Why is Marcus Persson a Billionaire?

[Anthropoid]

I want to pose a perhaps slightly 'sensitive' question to the regulars here at Matrix as well as any Matrix/Slitherine/Ageod staff who have the gumption to chime in.

I don't know what the net worth of all the wargame titles every published is, but something tells me it is substantially less than the ~$2,500,000,000.00 which Microsoft paid for the rights to Minecraft. On the other hand, I have often found the wargamer 'elitism' expressed on the Matrix forums to be quite explicit in its denigration of games like Minecraft.

Now please do not mistake my intent with this thread. I'm not trying start a fight, provoke emotions or otherwise generate a useless flamey thread that inevitably gets locked. Indeed, if anyone who posts in this thread starts taking it in that path, I'll ask a mod to intervene.

I personally have absolutely nothing against any particular genre of game and my very earliest beginnings as a gamer were playing hex map, paper-chit historical wargames under the tutelage of my History professor in high school. Perhaps most, but at least half of my gaming has been "war gaming" or at least "strategy gaming" (such as Civ) which is not too far from Matrix-style war games. So, I'm not some "outsider" here to throw rocks in your windows; I am one of you, a Matrix regular a wargamer with many thousands of hours of play at games like Crown of Glory Emperor's Edition, Forge of Freedom, War Plan Orange, War in the Pacific, etc.

But I also have played a lot of many other games from many genres, and it strikes me as perplexing that the "wargamer community," of which we might assume the Matrix forum regulars to be "representative" is so separated from the mainstream.

I guess another way I might put this thread's theme, the central question I'd enjoy hearing lots of people respond to: Why haven't Matrix games become billionaires yet? Can turn-based strategy or war game genres EVER achieve as much commercial success as games like Minecraft?

Now just one 'heading it off' before it starts comment I want to make, anticipating responses like "Great games are not about commercial success, they are about 'quality,' or some-such. . ." Bullshit. Designers who fail to pay the bills, or better yet, pay the bills and sock a good amount away / expand and improve their skills and business, are not going to be making games for too much longer (unless they are already wealthy and don't need to be successful). When designers of particular genres make meager returns on their effort, then those genres may (arguably) be at risk of "dying out" or being reduced in popularity and market breadth to the extent that they become veritable "zombie institutions." This is a bad thing for all of us. Less diversity in the games is bad both for the guys and gals who make them and for those of us who buy and play and love them. Also, I do not think that a zero-sum model of the gaming market economics is necessarily that valid. Certainly there is a market and it has limited 'shares' over which various enttities must compete. But of any consumer market segment, computer and video games has got to be the singlemost promising as far as growth over the next 20 years. You've got hundreds of millions of people globally coming into the "middle class" and with enough disposable income and infrastructure to enjoy computer games.

So having said all that, let me wrap up this longish starter post by saying: I wish that Matrix/Slitherine/Ageod could get paid a couple billion bucks for the rights to one or more of their titles. To me that would be fantastic for ALL of us. I guess then what I'm getting at is, why has something like that not happened, or if it is even conceivably possible? If so, what innovations do strategy/war-gaming developers and publishers need to consider as prospects to expand their audience and their pocketbooks?

[Fallschirmjager]

Easy answer
Minecraft has sold over 60 million copies
Id you added up every Matrix games over the years I would think sales have not cracked 200,000

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

Easy answer
Minecraft has sold over 60 million copies
Id you added up every Matrix games over the years I would think sales have not cracked 200,000

I think it is more like >100,000,000 copies, and that is for PC downloads alone.

I think this answer is undeniably TRUE! [:D]

However, it is also undeniably incomplete and fails to identify what my post-doctoral mentor liked to call "upstream forces" or what I'd call "ultimate causal forces."

What I'm getting at is: why is a game with silly blockhead graphics that involves whacking on chunks of Earth with a tool and then building stuff with the materials so WILDLY popular, yet a game like War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition, a veritable Sistine Chapel of exquisite detail, elegance, naturalism and beauty (and with graphics that arguably 'compete' with those of Minecraft) is barely heard of anywhere on the Internet outside of these pages?

Again, the immediate answer seems obvious: WiTPAE (any many other "wargames" to varying degrees) is very "difficult" to even use, much less play, or learn to master, but this immediate answer then raises the issue of upstream or 'what if' possibilities.

Would it be possible to make a game that was as naturalistic, 'realistic' (I put that in quotes because it is such a problematic term to apply to any computer game), satisfying to the 'war-gamer' fans, but still wildly (or even just 'more') popular?

[Jeffrey H.]

I'd venture a guess at it by saying that the games sold here are only going to appeal to a small, tiny, miniscule portion of the populace.

Mincraft is for the 99.999%, WITP is for the 0.001 %.

My first "real" job was working in a hobby shop / game store at eh tender early age of 15.5 yrs out of the womb. Since that time I have never allowed myself to consider this game addiction anything other than a hobby, and not a widely accepted one.

[Fallschirmjager]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

Easy answer
Minecraft has sold over 60 million copies
Id you added up every Matrix games over the years I would think sales have not cracked 200,000

I think it is more like >100,000,000 copies, and that is for PC downloads alone.

I think this answer is undeniably TRUE! [:D]

However, it is also undeniably incomplete and fails to identify what my post-doctoral mentor liked to call "upstream forces" or what I'd call "ultimate causal forces."

What I'm getting at is: why is a game with silly blockhead graphics that involves whacking on chunks of Earth with a tool and then building stuff with the materials so WILDLY popular, yet a game like War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition, a veritable Sistine Chapel of exquisite detail, elegance, naturalism and beauty (and with graphics that arguably 'compete' with those of Minecraft) is barely heard of anywhere on the Internet outside of these pages?

Again, the immediate answer seems obvious: WiTPAE (any many other "wargames" to varying degrees) is very "difficult" to even use, much less play, or learn to master, but this immediate answer then raises the issue of upstream or 'what if' possibilities.

Would it be possible to make a game that was as naturalistic, 'realistic' (I put that in quotes because it is such a problematic term to apply to any computer game), satisfying to the 'war-gamer' fans, but still wildly (or even just 'more') popular?

I think if the answer was easy to figure out then being a billionaire would be easy.

Minecraft hit a certain chord with people and it worked. I cannot explain it beyond that.
I happened to like it a lot as well.

For whatever reason, wargames do not hit that mass chord in the way some other games do.

[Anthropoid]

The intriguing ("ironic?") thing is, if you take Persson at his word, he never really wanted the thing to become as popular as it became. He was just farting around, having fun! [&:]

I have been farting around having fun for years and I have yet to make a goddamn penny from it! [:'(]

[Qwixt]

I would try/play minecraft, but I refuse to install java on any system I own, which is kind of funny, because it's one of the languages I have to program in at work.

[TulliusDetritus]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

The intriguing ("ironic?") thing is, if you take Persson at his word, he never really wanted the thing to become as popular as it became. He was just farting around, having fun! [&:]

I have been farting around having fun for years and I have yet to make a goddamn penny from it! [:'(]

The right product, at the right moment, at the right place [8D] From this guy perpective, all the planets of the whole universe lined up in one perfectly straight line. Now bring the women, booze, mega expensive things. The guy can afford the lot of them [:D]

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: TulliusDetritus

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

The intriguing ("ironic?") thing is, if you take Persson at his word, he never really wanted the thing to become as popular as it became. He was just farting around, having fun! [&:]

I have been farting around having fun for years and I have yet to make a goddamn penny from it! [:'(]

The right product, at the right moment, at the right place [8D] From this guy perpective, all the planets of the whole universe lined up in one perfectly straight line. Now bring the women, booze, mega expensive things. The guy can afford the lot of them [:D]

warspite1

That's a succinct summary for the first question I think.

Re the second point I doubt that anyone is going to get fantastically rich from niche war-games. What's the average age on the WITP-AE forum for example? Another problem is that amongst the (relatively) small specialist war-gaming community, not all war gamers want the same type of game. The level of complexity, the level of realism, the game type (strategic, operational, tactical), the subject, the game mechanics etc etc, further dilute the numbers that will purchase a particular game.

[TulliusDetritus]

I don't think you can rationalise these things. They simply happen. If someone managed to replicate it, s/he would be the next Economics Nobel Prize Winner. In fact s/he would be winning that award like 10 times in row. There's nothing rational here. Think about the Gangnam Style guy thing [:D][8|]

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
What I'm getting at is: why is a game with silly blockhead graphics that involves whacking on chunks of Earth with a tool and then building stuff with the materials so WILDLY popular, yet a game like War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition, a veritable Sistine Chapel of exquisite detail, elegance, naturalism and beauty (and with graphics that arguably 'compete' with those of Minecraft) is barely heard of anywhere on the Internet outside of these pages?

My brother put it very succinctly once when I was in a bout of trying to get him to play the games I like to play. He said, “When I play a game I like to get lost for a few hours, I don’t want it to feel like work.”

So basically the easier and simpler a game is (not to mention prettier), the more popular it will be with the masses. They used to track statistics of the kinds of people who purchased wargames back in the 70s and 80s via consumer review cards you’d mail back to a company. Wargamers were found to be generally higher educated and more affluent than most other gamer types.

That’s not to say we are better, it’s just that we enjoy the complexity, its part of our DNA or something. Most people do not enjoy complexity and are put off by complex games.

Jim

[MrsWargamer]

My first wargame was Tactics II.

I think we can agree, it was a simple wargame.

My next game was Midway. I too was a simple game.

I loooooved playing those two games.

I have likely played those two games more often than any one of my Matrix Games titles (with the exception of Battle Academy).

I think if my first wargame had been Advanced Third Reich, or basically most of the Matrix Games catalogue, the statement would be false, they wouldn't have been 'first games' I'd have never become a wargamer.

THAT is your answer. You might not like that answer. I don't care if that answer doesn't sit well with some. After 40 years of wargaming, seeing almost ALL the wargames made in 40 years for the most part, that is an expert opinion.

People dumped all over Battle Academy. Laughed at the cartoon graphics. They call it beer and pretzels code words for 'not a real wargame' for some reason. I think the hard core deserve to be shunned. If you want to compete dollars and cents against a really fun game like Minecraft, how about you make a wargame that is REALLY actually fun.

If I could back up time, I would only be doing it to unbuy some of my dumb impulse clearly have no brains purchases. Because even though War in the West is so awesom on so many levels, it is NEVER going to be Minecraft. It's not even going to interest anyone outside of a narrow bunch of old men.

I hope Gary likes the accolades, because that is all his games are good for. I mean the Sistine Chapel, a reasonable comparison. That chapel almost killed him eh. He didn't die rich and famous. We made him famous a long time after he was dead and gone. Still an awesome painting.

I play wargames, I have an uncontrollable urge to buy the damned things. It annoys me.
If I could hand over all my serials for all my games, to a buyer I'd do it. Hey, I own almost every wargame here guys. I'll sell them stupid cheap.

[TulliusDetritus]

One more thing to mention about Minecraft. The players are basically children. And of course they are great [indirect] customers! Walt Disney knows this very well. What parents will say "no" when their child wants to see the last Disney movie? [;)] It's a win-win scenario. My 11 years old niece plays of course Minecraft (and so do all her friends, classmates), although I introduced her to Left4Dead when she was 8. Not very mature -I know- but she loved it and was quite good at massacring zombies

[Fallschirmjager]

ORIGINAL: MrsWargamer

My first wargame was Tactics II.

I think we can agree, it was a simple wargame.

My next game was Midway. I too was a simple game.

I loooooved playing those two games.

I have likely played those two games more often than any one of my Matrix Games titles (with the exception of Battle Academy).

I think if my first wargame had been Advanced Third Reich, or basically most of the Matrix Games catalogue, the statement would be false, they wouldn't have been 'first games' I'd have never become a wargamer.

THAT is your answer. You might not like that answer. I don't care if that answer doesn't sit well with some. After 40 years of wargaming, seeing almost ALL the wargames made in 40 years for the most part, that is an expert opinion.

People dumped all over Battle Academy. Laughed at the cartoon graphics. They call it beer and pretzels code words for 'not a real wargame' for some reason. I think the hard core deserve to be shunned. If you want to compete dollars and cents against a really fun game like Minecraft, how about you make a wargame that is REALLY actually fun.

If I could back up time, I would only be doing it to unbuy some of my dumb impulse clearly have no brains purchases. Because even though War in the West is so awesom on so many levels, it is NEVER going to be Minecraft. It's not even going to interest anyone outside of a narrow bunch of old men.

I hope Gary likes the accolades, because that is all his games are good for. I mean the Sistine Chapel, a reasonable comparison. That chapel almost killed him eh. He didn't die rich and famous. We made him famous a long time after he was dead and gone. Still an awesome painting.

I play wargames, I have an uncontrollable urge to buy the damned things. It annoys me.
If I could hand over all my serials for all my games, to a buyer I'd do it. Hey, I own almost every wargame here guys. I'll sell them stupid cheap.

I would call Battle Academy to be 'lite' wargaming. But I don't have the opinion that lite cannot be good.
Any game has the ability to be good. Very simple things if done right can be fantastic. So can very complex things.
Things can also go very wrong with either approach. I have played enough video games to see just about every approach and every style tried and done both incredibly well and incredibly wrong.

[Anthropoid]

Yep, it has got to be "fun."

Listening to monotonous, repetitive, childish, vapid music while you watch a blockhead avatar whack on trees, whack on blocks rock, whack on blocks of ore, etc., and running away from zombies is apparently fun for a lot of people.

Learning to "operate" a complex apparatus like "War in the Pacific: Admiral's Edition" (which is probably more complicated than the user's manual for your average modern military technical job) in order to watch hundreds and thousands of little icons move around, and (periodically) engage in little combat animations . . . shockingly not as fun for so many people.

God I used to love those when I used to play War Plan Orange and WiTP . . . it was like the little food pellet being dispensed to the rat for having pressed the keys enough . . . if you pressed them "properly" and planned well, you'd get satisfying images and text in your graphical reward pellet such as a barrage of torpedoes taking out a Japanese Cruiser, etc, if you hadn't properly planned, you might get one of those bad popups.

[IainMcNeil]

Sales wise we're in the millions or tens of millions, but I couldn't tell you how many as its not a stat we track. We have a fair number of games which have sold more than 200,000 units on their own, some of them multiples of that number

I'm not trying to belittle what Minecraft achieved but there is a large element of luck. Its a good game and one that has the potential to appeal to a wide audience but it just caught on. Sometimes this happens and sometimes it doesn't. There are many games which are great which don't take off and a lot of it is like fashion - it gets attention from the right person at the right time and sometimes there is a snowball effect. I doubt he'd ever be able to repeat it. Its very rare that someone comes from nothing with a major hit and then is able to follow it up with another. This is true of all entertainment industries not just games.

Mine craft could have died without trace. Predicting his sales before release would have been almost impossible. Thousands of games release each week and 99.9% lose money. Wargames is a very different market with a more focused but smaller pool of people to sell to. We're never going to sell tens of millions of units of a single title.

[Pvt_Grunt]

Minecraft is a totally "Open" sandbox game. It has some vague achievments to fulfill, but none of my 3 kids ever bother with those. The sandbox style is interesting as children straight away "find" something to do, cut a tree, dig a hole etc. Adult brains like mine look at it and think "What is the goal, how do you win?" So, many adults cannot fathom the success of a game with terrible graphics, no winner and no clear objective! There are PHD's to be had studying this.

Also, there is the creative mode for younger kids which is much like a PC lego game.
Also there is a healthy online community of mods to keep it fresh.
Also it is multiplatform, Xbox, PC iPad etc.
Also the creators have continually supported, upgraded and hugely expanded the game, all for free. No DLC, no expansion pack. For parents like me this is GOLD.

Essentially, the game is everything and anything the player wants.
ps - I respect the game and see it's strengths, but I still dont know what to do with it!! [8|] Back to Panzer Corps for me!

[fsp1978]

For what it's worth, I have never felt the need to try out Minecraft, from what I have seen and heard it doesn't appeal to me.

But the original question is really very simple to answer and has already been answered in this thread: Through football I am friends with a lot of people from very different backgrounds, from university professor over stock market trader to someone living on social handouts. Most people are "simpler" to please than your average wargamer. They are looking for instant gratification.

Boom, I killed someone in COD. 60-90 secons later: Boom, I died/killed someone else.

See, I dug a hole in Minecraft. There it is.

I scored a goal in FIFA15. My mate sitting next to me is looking like he wants to explode. This is fun!

The average gamer I know doesn't even have the patience to play tutorials. I have a 15-year old cousin who I have to talk into playing tutorials when we try out a game that's new to both of us. He simply didn't like the idea and wanted to dive right in (later he told me it was a good idea to play the tutorial, otherwise we had never known how to play the game right...).

For strategy games, the reward comes only after hours and hours of scheming, planning and executing. Ultimately you may even fail (gasp).

So you are never going to sell in those volumes, as most people want instant relaxation and gratification. Sometimes I even feel the same.

[MrsWargamer]

Ian is correct. Some games are a roll of the dice, an unexplainable fluke. A result that defies all understanding.

I have witnessed more than a few games that make me wonder, 'why is this one so popular?'.

My most addictive games, are what you guys call 'gem games'. I have deleted them in the past after playing them a lot because I found I was getting annoyed with how much I was playing the stupid thing.

It's not easy to know what is better, put all your soul into one massively detailed all or nothing design, and then barely get back what you put in to it. I make a 100 games equal to 100 rolls of the dice, barely any skill required and then watch as 3 of them suddenly make you a millionaire. And at that point, you don't really care than the other 97 generated almost nothing at all. Because when you make your first million, it's not really vital to care.

I'v seen Android spill quite a lot of sludge out into the market place. I'm guessing most of it makes no real income.
But that is a guess with nothing to back it up.
I wonder how much Victor has made with Small General?

[Erik Rutins]

Minecraft is not so much as game as really a version of LEGOs for the computer. A gigantic interactive sandbox and kids absolutely love it because of that. I think the degree of its success was surprising for everyone, but not that it succeeded at all. The amount of work he put into it is also pretty staggering and becomes clear as you tinker around with it - there are many layers of discovery and creation.

Really though, I'm in this thread to voice my support for Anthropoid's signature:

The x-ray is her siren song. My ship cannot resist her long. Nearer to my deadly goal. Until the black hole. Gains control...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkIIlkyZ ... playnext=3

Through the void
To be destroyed
Or is there something more?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz_6N0osLCI

Regards,

- Erik