More fresh
The Longest Journey questions this weekend.
Maybe my harshest critics are right? Maybe it's time to put
TLJ behind me and move on to something else? Maybe I'm stuck in the past, living off past successes, unable to move on, unable to tear myself away from the one thing that gives me validation?
Nah.
As long as people keep playing the game, and as long as people keep writing me asking questions about
TLJ, I'll keep talking about it. When no one cares anymore, I'll stop. Promise.
Anyways, here's a brand new section called:
Answering This Past Weekend's Reader Mail(Is this joke getting old? Yes. Yes it is. But my dogma is: Repeat until funny. And then keep repeating until everybody hates your guts. That way, you don't ever have to come up with any new material.)
I recently finished The Longest Journey and having done so I am pondering its future…if there is one at all. The adventure game market might be a smaller niche, but I’d like it if you could clarify if 300,000 copies were sufficient to cover how much money was invested in the game by Funcom and or other parties.The latest number I've heard is closer to
400,000 -- a very respectable number for an adventure-game. Heck, it's an excellent number for
any PC game. Unless your game is called
Diablo IV: That Damn Diablo Is At It Again,
Warcraft XXXIII: So Very Tired,
John Carmack Goes Bananas With An Uzi,
Will Wright's SimPutz Featuring John Romero, or
EA Sports Presents Tiger Wood's Crazy-Golf Conquest, you're extremely lucky to shift a few hundred thousand "units" (marketing-speak for a copy of the game). Funcom makes decent money from the sales of
TLJ, and we were profitable a year ago.
However -- and this is the sad, sad reality of the retail business --
TLJ will soon no longer be available on store-shelves in the USA. Why? Because we're running out of copies, and, apparently, it's too expensive to manufacture a whole new run. While the game still sells a bunch every week, it's not enough to justify a new batch, since the distributor might get stuck with a lot of unsold boxes. It's a risk they -- and Funcom -- are not willing to take, unfortunately. So...if you still haven't picked up a copy of
TLJ, do so now. In a few months' time, you might have a hard time getting hold of it.
In the UK, however,
TLJ has been released on a budget label --
Xplosiv, for the ridiculously low price of £9.99 (that's practically
giving it away) -- and should still be available for a while yet.
Have you considered having a bulletin board of sorts to interact with fans and get a feel for what they think of your works?I thought about having a bulletin board once, just for fun. But then I wisely reconsidered. First of all, there aren't enough visitors to this site to justify having a dedicated board. It would just look sorta sad and empty, like a holiday resort in the rainy season. Secondly, I'm not particularly technically inclined, and since I currently run this site on my own in-between a million other responsibilities, I don't have the time (nor the required IQ) to learn how a bulletin board works. Thirdly, it's time-consuming enough to post in this journal -- I love it, it's fun, but it
is time-consuming -- and I simply don't have time to post on any more boards. I try to add my comments to the
TLJ forum once in a great while, I check out the
Anarchy Online story forum quite often (though I rarely post), and I'm feeling guilty enough about not having posted
anything on the
Midgard forums since last autumn. I just don't want to spread myself any thinner. Unfortunately. But if the visitor numbers ever pick up dramatically, and I get some help, I might reconsider!
On that note, I'd like to do an informal survey about how many people visit this site on a
regular basis (i.e. you've been here more than once and you check in at least once every fortnight). If you are a Regular Reader, send a blank e-mail to this address:
regularreader@ragnartornquist.com. Don't worry about adding a subject, I won't be reading the mails anyhow. And your privacy won't be violated, as all the mails will be deleted as soon as they've been tallied up.
Cheers!
