Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweed
Niche meaning a niche baseball/sports game with a "career/dynasty" universe to play in similar to FM.
I'd say what allowed OOTP to stay in business was the way it stayed ahead of the competition it once had. 15-20 years ago OOTP was not the only choice for this niche. I'd say by 2010 OOTP had distanced itself from that competition and never looked back. Many of the decisions they made then were criticized with a lot of "if you do that it will be the end of OOTP" comments. Those critics were wrong.
I'd also give them a bit more credit than they are successful because they are in "this particular niche". If it only took a game maker to fill a needed niche to be successful someone out there would be having a nice payday with an NFL equivalent to OOTP. Many have tried and, so far, none have reached the level of success that OOTP has.
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Again, totally disagree. If we look more closely at OOTP we notice many components which were added and then more or less abandoned (not one of which is the UI which has never been updated). Which reveals they have far more vision than resources. If a deeper pocketed competitor wished to grab the market away from OOTP they could simply borrow heavily all the concepts OOTP has introduced but has never done much with and develop their own versions of those. Why doesn't someone do that? Because the market share is not worth the investment. Besides, OOTP, being the stand-alone product, has the MLB license. Now, have they earned that? Sure, no doubt, but that isn't the question. Given the resources of OOTP there's no way they could graduate into a bigger pond of competitors and survive, but in this baseball-sim market they can. That's a niche.