I've touched on this briefly, but now is as good a time as any to go more in depth on the subject.
Love your hardcore fans, developer, for they will see you through the rough times. Appealing to the casual audiences may bring lots of dough, but make one misstep and you'll be having some really rough times.
What do I mean by this?
Look, it's pretty clear to anyone without a god complex that not every game you make will be a success. When those games aren't a large enough success to recoup the amount of work that went into them, you start having financial troubles. This is very obvious.
Sufficiently large enough games take an extraordinary amount of work to complete. Practically every game actually worth $20 or more, has had years to percolate. So to recover from a disastrous game puts a lot of stress on a studio, because you need a lot of time in order to release a new game that addresses what the players hated.
Video games generally aren't a hugely profitable industry anyway, and when you have a good success of a game it's quite easy for that money to fly away.
Your fans who are hardcore supporters of you and your studio though, will forgive your inevitable missteps. They'll buy your crappy game, and be eager to buy your next game because they have faith that the next one will be better. In fact, it's actually hard to accidentally alienate a hardcore fan. You have to very purposefully treat them like dirt in order to drive away the most fanatical. Love them, because they love you.
Really, dealing with fans is just an extension of normal interpersonal relationships. Fairweather fans are fairweather friends, and you can never rely on them. Just appreciate them when they're there, but never make plans around them. They're just there for the experience of it all, not because they want to actively contribute and make it their own.
This division between the fairweather and the fanatical extends even further in unexpected ways when you start conversing with your audience, which I'll write more on next week.
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