I made a similar argument to Duk's a while back. I did not know about the 0.2% retention rate.
We are a small niche market; we are guys (and a few gals) for whom Risk, the board game, had great appeal. This was before video games existed and board games was where one could have a real "thinking game" that was not chess or checkers. (I did not appreciate the role of luck until recently, btw, to make this game even more appealing. As I told someone in a forum thread, if you do not want luck to be a factor, play chess.)
SO this site will never have huge # of players and will not retain many. Those to me are given factors, so complaining about who we are and what we are is not going to productive.
With all that said, I think we can retain a few more NRs by making a few changes. Speed games would appeal to the "younger" Crowd and we should NOT ignore our largest new market. Most "old guys" like Duk and I have likely found an online site to play Risk already, so we will not grow much there.
Last point (for now): I played Risk with my high school Chess Club members some in the past 10 years or so. It was a good game for some and we had lots of FUN. In the past few years, we opened up the Club to a wider variety of games and Chess really dropped in favor of 1) D&D, and 2) other newer games, such as Coup. The number of students involved stayed about the same. In light of such other options, I could not get students committed to play Risk in 75-90 minutes, even with Team variations I introduced to our games. The game takes a significant amount of time to set up and play in Real Life.
JP4Fun
Arama86n wrote:Dukasaur wrote:2dimes wrote:Other than a bunch of multis signing up for a week of speed games it seems like a possible improvement over, new member joins a game, nothing happens for 20 minutes, they never come back.
I've seen guide games where the game starts within 2 minutes, not 20, and still the guy never takes his turn.
Bottom line is, most people google "war game" they expect something like Call to Duty or Rome Total War. They want realistic-sounding explosions and realistic-looking blood spatter. A game about a bunch of numbers on a map is only the thing for a few old farts like me. Bottom line is, our retention rate is never going to get better than the 0.2% that it is, because we're just not what most people are thinking of when they google "war game." It's a tiny niche product and will never attract a broad audience. People have to stop fantasizing that it will change if we just tweak this detail or that detail. It was never higher than 0.2% even in its heyday, but in its heyday it was (for a little while) trendy among recent college grads, and that kept the new arrivals coming.
I googled "RISK online" all those years ago. I knew exactly what I was looking for.
I would have thought, and hoped, that a reasonable number of people that find their way to this site were looking to play the board game online?
But yeah, anyone looking for something like Call of Duty isn't going to be very impressed, haha.
