Even though the concept of the Long Tail seems obvious now that it has been discussed and indeed showcased excessively by the success of companies such as Amazon, EBay and Apple through its iTunes store, I can't help but smile at the simplicity of the idea.
In fact, reading Anderson, I cant help but feel empowered, mostly by his stipulation that for every small producer of creative works, there is an audience out there somewhere that is willing to consume said works. Previously I would have felt that it is pointless to produce anything online, because it would just get lost in the vast sea of content that is the web. Now however, I feel that there is an audience there that just needs to be reached.
Truthfully, I should have been aware of the effect of The Long Tail quite some time ago, back in the mid 1990s, when we were producing low key freeware games at Horizont Entertainment. We created a turn based strategy title, named Battlelords.
The game started its life on an Atari ST platform, using Omikron Basic, but was ported over to MS-DOS using Borland Pascal in and around the time the commercial Internet launched in the middle of the 90s. The game, when finished, was more for our own entertainment than for a general audience, but with the ability to make it available online at almost no cost (bar the 100 DM hosting per annum), we figured we might as well share it with the PD / Freeware community.To cut a long story short, the title was growing in popularity at a slow but steady rate and was eventually downloaded several hundred times a month. For a game that we only ever intended for personal entertainment and as a pet project, these figures were a bit of a mystery to us, bearing in mind that this was at the early stage of Internet adoption.
Even when Microsoft released Windows 2000 and then Windows XP, which were platforms that were no longer able to run our code without the use of an emulator such as DosBOX or a virtual machine running MS-DOS, we still continued to have a sizable count of downloads every month. Even more interestingly, the stats package we ran on our cheap shared hosting plan revealed that a lot of the traffic was actually coming from South America and Eastern Europe, which were markets that we never even thought about when we made the software available in the first place.
We have since tried to make time and port the game to Java, upgrade its graphics and sound and allow it to run on modern day systems, even including mobile phones. Having been written for what today seems like very low hardware specs, the game now even runs on some Windows Mobile platforms using a pocket DOS emulator. Sadly, we have never found the time, and frankly, given the abundance of competitive offers out there, we had never thought it really worth pursuing seriously.
Reading The Long Tail has however left me with a gut feeling that we should not abandon this idea after all. Maybe, if Anderson is right, which he certainly appears to be, there is demand for a solid turn based strategy game today. And maybe, we could even charge a small fee for a well designed game that has already proven that its mechanics, balance and scope are appealing to a wide range of users around the world, even without any serious effort of SEO or other marketing.
The bottom line is that I am left much more optimistic about the possibility of publishing creative content on the web. I no longer feel that the abundance of alternative offers will make a single user's contributions disappear, but rather that the ease of access to all forms and shapes of content can help us reach those people that are actually genuinely interested in our contributions.
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