Episodic Strategy Games or "PBM"?

[GrimFinger]

Not so much about gold, as about oxygen for the hobby.

No amount of colorful analogies constitute a viable substitute for effective advertising. You want "oxygen" for the hobby, then you won't get it by recirculating ads that don't work in the first place.

I doubt many advertisers in S&D want to share active customer emails with my company, so we all need new players as despite your earnest efforts and open attitude to about any approach, we all would like to see significant new entrants into episodic strategy gaming, or PBEM which may not be happening with a focus on PBM.

That's because these days, the old practice of sharing customer data, which actually helped promote and grow the PBM hobby and industry, is widely frowned upon these days.

Yes, I understand the sentimental value, and the connection potential with the older players that we have not yet connected with. Well, I guess that's about it on this subject, until someone else brings it up. Horse & Buggy, or Automobile? Flying Machine or Jet?

Again, more attempts at colorful word play, but your arguments are unpersuasive.

In all of the years that you've been arguing your case in that manner, your persuasiveness on the subject hasn't improved.

From my perspective, you argue in favor of a one-legged horse, one that can't walk and get anywhere, for the very simple reason that you can't find your horse a second leg to stand on.

Your own forum, one with thousands of postings by your players, is a desert, when it comes to the term episodic. Your own players don't discuss the game that you offer for play utilizing that term that you want to stake the fate of the future of the hobby on.

Since you like colorful word play a lot, here's one for you. Slapping a label on a bottle and calling it Episodic doesn't make it either more palatable in taste or a miracle cure. It is what it is - verbal snake oil.

Am I aware of other games - popular games - that are of recent vintage, and which make use of the term episodic in their advertising? I sure am. It's not as though I have done no exploring and research of my own.

You talk about nostalgia, when you're the one who is nostalgic for a return to the days of yesteryear, to a time when the hobby had a single, unifying term - namely, PBM.

The frank truth is - those days are over. The hobby doesn't have it quite so easy, anymore. The world moved on. Competition has increased exponentially. Hell, the hobby isn't competing against just other games - it's competing against entertainment at large. You're competing with Netflix, with Facebook, with all sorts of things that gobble people's time while entertaining them in countless different ways.

What you advocate for is an illusion. The term that you advocate for - the problem isn't so much an accuracy problem, as far as describing how such games work, as it is an acceptance issue. You've latched onto a word that is ugly and lacks popularity.

Your ugly duckling of a term isn't ever going to turn into a swan.