Thread by @rdonoghue

So, this gets mentioned sometimes, but it probably merits re-mention. There are some wonderful Kathy Sierra article which were super important to the thinking that went into Evil Hat from the outset. Can still be found headrush.typepad.com/creating_passi… and headrush.typepad.com/creating_passi…

The premise can be summed up as this: If you make something for everyone, then no one is going to be excited about it. Making a product which genuinely excites 20% of your potential market and pisses off another 20% is a better position to be in than to be ok to everyone.

This can be counterintuitive, because there is a strong impulse to try to sell to *everybody*, but the math actually supports this. Unless you are a monopoly, you are never going to capture the WHOLE market, so you want to find a slice where you're going to get traction.

Part of this is making your peace with some people *not* being your target customers. Again, this can be counterintuitive - rejecting a customer *feels* bad for business. And yet, it's essential.

For a very simplified example, suppose you make a widget. Half your users really want it to be red, the other half blue. You can only make one color, what do you do?

If you decide to cleverly compromise and do purple, you're in trouble, since now you're everyone's 2nd best.

If you're a monopoly, you can get away with it, but otherwise you are going to find your lunch has been eaten by people who were willing to go red or blue and forgo the other half.

Anyway, the discussion of this (and other things, including vodka) were there at the start of Evil Hat, and are pretty much baked into the DNA.

Which is to say, from day 1, we made our peace with not everyone being a potential customer.

This can show up in things like mechanical or design decisions, but it can also show up in thinks like being frank about HPL.

There are consequences to a choice like that, but that's the point of making choices.

I mention this because some of the botops have mentioned that we're "alienating customers", and it's worth clarifying that by definition, we aren't. :)

Now, we *are* making a bet that there is a customer base that wants the thing we make. That's the nature of business. Might be right, might be wrong.

But it's a bet on gaming as we see it, and we genuinely think it's the right bet.

Now, any product might fail.

For FoC, risks include:
* Cthulhu saturation
* FATE saturation
* Green is an unpopular color
* Unwelcome print size
* Curse of small press

Critically, I don't think they include:
* Speaking frankly about HPL

I believe we're better than that.

Now, here's the other horrible confession: This is ABSOLUTELY marketing

See, marketing is (when done right) the act of revealing the VALUE of a product to the people who want that value. It shares what it is and what it is not in order to make that connection and deliver value

There are deceptive ways to do this - to create a sense of value which is not actually present, or to incite a desire for unneeded value - but those are short term, low payout strategies.

The better plan is to genuinely seek to communicate value and deliver it to the right folks

So, when EHP talks about something that's important in the game, it is absolutely marketing. It is saying "Our game does X, and if X is your bag, that may be of interest to you, but if you don't like X, we'd rather spare you an unpleasant surprise"

This is easy for us, because it's true. If anything, our biggest challenge is in not firehosing with overcommunication. We want to sell games, but we want to do it in a way where everyone walks away happy - us because you value our game, and you because it's the game you want.

What's more, even if not articulated this way, this is true of almost every RPG publisher out there.

If we were in it to be making long dollars, we'd be doing something else.

So, yes. Marketing. It happens. We do it. We *talk* about doing it. It's a REALLY NEAT topic. And (hopefully) everyone benefits.

I'm not going to argue that every marketing effort in the world is structured like this, but for small companies, it's the path to health.

Tellingly, this thread has managed to get half a dozen "You're gonna lose money!" opbot responses, so I'm obviously emotionally devastated and persuaded that these are real humans with reading skills.

Normally, if people don't like an Evil Hat product, I can recommend alternatives, of which there are many of great variety and fantastic quality. Everyone wins when you find the right game for you.

However, I don't have any reccs for "It is bad to have called HPL racist", sorry