Raph Koster is currently wondering where popularity comes from on his blog, but although he starts from The Wisdom of Crowds, a lot of Raph's discussion of opening big versus opening small seems to have more to do with network effects such as those described by The Tipping Point: the viral spreading of recommendations that
produce J-Curves after release, the film industry’s feting of
connectors and mavens to build hype before a film’s release and the connected audience's use of communications to quickly kill turkeys regardless of the hype.
Does
the difference in curves come down to a content versus network comparison?
If
your product provides a short term blast of content, you hype it to
connectors and mavens before the release, use the hype to make sure you
get mind share at release and then use popularity and network effects to spread the
product to as many people as possible before your content is consumed,
the short term wow factor fades and your product is replaced by the
next hit.
If your product relies on network effects you play
the long game: release early, attract early adopters, mavens and
connectors after release and then work hard to cross the chasm and
enter the mainstream, relying on the fact that the early adopters won’t
consume the content and leave, but will get more value through network
effects.
Darniaq’s original question of how can things be popular when they’re
so clearly broken also seems to be better explained by the long tail than the wisdom of crowds: popular things
tend to have some appeal to a wide variety of people who may all love lots of different niche things more.
So, if you're trying to build a blast of content that's popular you have to get something that has some appeal to a wide variety of people, even though a lot of them may consider it a bit broken. In the case of films or traditional games you can tweak and focus test and try to fete connectors and mavens before release, but once it's out the gate it's a one shot rocket. In the case of online games you have more scope to change things after release, but you still have limited time as your content is burned through and we've yet to see how successful large scale changes like those recently made to Star Wars: Galaxies will be. As time goes on it will become even more difficult to create popular content with mass appeal as people find it easier to find niche content in the long tail that will appeal to them more. It seems that trying to tip long tailed crowds with content powered rockets is not very wise.
Far better to rely on having legs and network effects to build popularity over the long term without having crippling content creation costs. And if you can build in a long tail, all the better.
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