Quote Originally Posted by Odin
The market is there? I'm sorry but I dont believe it. I dont have numbers to back me up, but my instinct tells me that the "medieval indies" for game scope might not be a great seller.

The TW series arent nitch games, I concede Shogun lends credence to your presentation, but in all candeor the big sellers in PC military/strat games have always been Western Medieval, Roman, WWII, and american civil war.

the % of titles that fall into those categories speak to the viability of my claim.
Just to back-up the points made in my last post, I think this may be a mis-analysis of the way the global market is shaped nowadays. We in the West (you're in MA, USA, right?) are going to see some of our verities challenged in the next decade or so.

In the West, we know Western history, obviously. That's why we buy games based on Western history. Up until recently, Westerners made up the majority of game purchasers. As a result, games have tended to be tailored to their tastes. That will change.

I do have the numbers to back me up. The combined middle classes of India and China make up a larger population than that of the US - by over 33%. They can afford computer games. They'll buy games about Gettysburg and Cannae but how much more responsive would they be to games covering their own history?

And that's just for now. The middle classes in Asia are growing far faster than the total populations of those countries (i.e., more people are becoming affluent as a proportion of the total). And Asian countries are growing far faster than those in the West. We're about to become a minority section of the market.

The future "big sellers in PC military/strat games" may not look much like the current and past ones. What is considered niche will change considerably. The American Civil War was an internal dispute lasting 4-5 years and involving only two sides - how much resonance does that have to 1.1billion Indonesians? The Hundred Years War? Armies how small? Involving whom? And the average Vietnamese cares because? That's niche.

I could be wrong: an Indies TW title might not sell - but only for now. Long-term, stuff about Asia will outsell stuff about Europe by such an enormous margin it'll seem impolite to discuss the two at the same time!