I’ll still maintain my “it’ll come when it’s time” stance, but it would probably help your guys’s speculation if you reason through the problem. ActionButler got a good start on it.
- What is the premise of the Battletech product? This is fundamentally a board game that functions frequently as but isn’t required to be a war game.
- Assume your customer base is split into factions with different tastes: primarily campaigners (RPG players for lack of a better word), fiction readers, pick-up players, war-gamers (may be WYSIWYG zealots or not), armchair generals (theorists including fans of hardware, science, and strategy), and artists (all fan art, fanfic, painting, and terrain making)
-Players are usually primarily one group but have affinity for other groups.
-Assume your player base is small. Let’s do a Fermi estimate and say it’s 10,000 and not 100,000 and not 1,000.
- Also assume player commitment varies a lot and it’s been waning somewhat.
- Your local group experience doesn’t count. That’s your local group, a sub-sub-market, not the market.
- It is way easier to publish books than make boxed or blister pack products. You can do the latter, but your knowledge and resources are dedicated mostly to getting print published.
- Small business means 3-5 people with a bunch of volunteers and freelancers, not 100.
- It is also reasonable to assume that there is a theoretical new market out there, but your resources are limited.
From those premises you can probably construct better arguments.