I don’t know anything about Quartet Press other than the fact that they announced today that they’re closing. And I mean nothing.
Reading the post about their closure, however, made me think of a similar note I’d read only a few days ago. This one was about Manifesto Games, a site/biz run by a friend in the interactive industry. The owner, Greg Costikyan, closed up shop in June, saying:
We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available.
Now, Greg knows more about the business side of the games business than I ever will, but I’m not sure that what hurt Manifesto was a marketing problem. And while I know nothing about Quartet Press or the reason for its demise, I’m struck by one way in which the two companies are similar. They were both third parties to the relationship that exists between content provider and content consumer. [ Read more ]