Out Now: Skinny Latte Edition

[EICJoe]

Just a curiosity... why Fighting Fantasy legend is out of scope ?
Not that i have a special interest for the game but just to understand better.. Thanks

Hey marco,

Not sure if you noticed, but we recently did a reader feedback poll a couple of weeks ago, and the results have been published here.

We're essentially trying to tighten the games we cover, as there are a lot of concerns that Pocket Tactics has lost some of its identity. While I think the true story is a bit more complicated than that, if there's one thing that the past year can say it's that our attempts to widen the scope of PT hasn't really worked.

People came to us for a reason, and the next few months are going to be about trying to re-establish that. Unfortunately it means we will be cutting coverage of certain games. The Fighting Fantasy Legends mobile game is the first high-profile casualty of this new policy. Reflecting on it, it felt more like an adventure game than anything else and that's one of the dropped genres, ergo it didn't get a mention and won't be getting a full review.

With regards to your point Jeffy:

Interesting. I could maybe understand not doing a review on it, but, for articles like this, I don't get the need to be so limited in scope, especially when it's not strictly an adventure game. Boardgamegeek even did an article on it, so it definitely appeals to this type of audience.

It's not that I don't agree with you, but at the end of the day I had to make a decision. If people like BGG cover it, that's great - they felt it was worth covering. We've done a lot of that this past year, and as I mentioned above, it hasn't worked. I decided that FFL was outside of our remit, and there's no use flip-flopping on that choice now.

If, in a few months time, readers think our new stricter policy is causing us to miss out on too many things they're interested in (or generally they feel there should be exceptions) then we can look at this again.

Hope that helps!

[EICJoe]

Oh BTW - fixed the Neo Scavenger link. I was using the correct URL from iTunes but for some reason it wasn't working. Since it's universal however I simply used the iPad link instead of the iPhone one.

[J2D]

Put me in the "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" camp, especially when it comes to these new release posts. Fighting Fantasy Legends appears decidedly within the new scope, if you're covering RPGs anyway. Dave and Owen before him covered all the Sorcery games, for example. Dave even got beat up in comments for daring to give one of them 4 stars. That's the degree to which the historical audience of this site likes the gamebook/RPG kinda thing.

Joe, I don't understand the "there's no flip flopping on that choice now" comment. If you wanted to, you could just provide impressions this coming week right?

[EICJoe]

Put me in the "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" camp, especially when it comes to these new release posts. Fighting Fantasy Legends appears decidedly within the new scope, if you're covering RPGs anyway. Dave and Owen before him covered all the Sorcery games, for example. Dave even got beat up in comments for daring to give one of them 4 stars. That's the degree to which the historical audience of this site likes the gamebook/RPG kinda thing.

Joe, I don't understand the "there's no flip flopping on that choice now" comment. If you wanted to, you could just provide impressions this coming week right?

Hey J2D - I completely appreciate where you're coming from.

Just to clarify, all I mean't was: I made a decision regarding coverage of a game. I would like to stick to that decision so I can monitor the outcome - even it turns out that I made the wrong decision. I'm not infallible and sometimes I can make the wrong call.

To be honest, even if you want to classify FFL more as an RPG than an Adventure game (and I fully appreciate, the line can be thin), RPG's in general are joint third with CCGs, behind Strategy & Boardgames in terms of the snap-shot results. My reasoning is that we can probably take the hit on this one, and see what happens.

Even from this conversation, I've already identified a couple of things for me to think about:

* Do high-profile games like this one prove to be exceptions to the new rule regarding genres?
* Do I need to be more aware as to the potential interpretations of a game's genre, and perhaps try to include things by being creative with definitions?
* Even if dropped Genres don't get coverage, should high-profile games always get mentions & impressions in Out Now regardless? Is that what's expected of that particular article?
* Given that this isn't one of the 'core' genres (i.e., strategy & boardgames), is there an article I can commission (instead of a review) that would be more appropriate for the new focused direction we're trying to steer towards?

Beyond that, the general question of 'What is Pocket Tactics?' boils down to:

A/ A website that covers premium mobile games.
B/ A website that covers premium mobile strategy games.
C/ Something Else.

For the past year, I would like to think I've been doing option A, with some experimentation regarding F2P coverage. Recent events have led me to decide that perhaps we should try Option B for a while, see what happens (while also keeping in mind the results of the favourite genres poll). This doesn't leave much room for games like FFL (which, granted, perhaps we were too quick to label it as an out-of-remit genre?).

Fun Fact: While this was by no means the majority of feedback, we did get some comments from people asking us to *only* feature strategy games in Out Now. Not really possible considering the amount of decent releases in those genres these days, but it all feeds into this idea that perhaps we need to be a lot stricter on the things we cover.

I take your point regarding the things that Dave & Owen would talk about - that is of course the final dimension of Pocket Tactics. A big part of the prior success came down to these guys and their personal style/leadership. It's unfortunate, but I've been very up-front about this from the start - I can't emulate them. You're never going to get a Dave/Owen 2.0 from me.

If you guys, as a whole, think I'm being a bit stubborn on this, then I completely appreciate that. It's useful information I can use to improve Pocket Tactics going forward. At the moment, the question is "Is Fighting Fantasy Legends something we're expected to cover?" and my argument is that the answer is probably "No".

I am paying attention to all of the arguments to the contrary though

[SleepingGiant]

Yo Joe,

I'd advise C: focus on covering GOOD (4+ star) games, and the ones that have that potential, although they might turn out to not be so good, in which case your reviews then save people time and money.

Good is partly subjective, but would anyone argue that there are only at most a few games each week that look like they might deserve the spotlight? So, a few reviews each week and the Monday and Friday roundups usually capture them all, and members are helpful to point out any that may have slipped through the cracks in the comments.

As for genre and platform, my humble suggestion is to use the analytics from your survey (which I applaud your transparent sharing of results) as a guide, weighting towards strategy and iOS, but not a hard and fast rule by any means.

I echo the comments in the survey thread that the quality of writing is well above average, so don't worry about that. And in this thread, I notice you mention again whether or not you are expected to cover a given game. That sounds like a burden. How about just chat with your writers and figure out which upcoming games look most promising, have some fun playing them, thinking and writing/editing about them, and be proud that you really are putting up good new content every day, and not worry about any unreasonable expectations?

[jeffy777]

Thanks for the explanation, Joe. I guess I liked the "scope" of the site just the way it was before, so seeing less games covered is a bummer for me.