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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Sandbox   >   Help me find some True Fans

Help me find some True Fans

By on September 29, 2011

For the introduction for one of the books I am writing, I need to find some real, honest-to-goodness true fans in the worlds of games, music, books and films.

whaleistock

(I’m using true fans instead of whales. See my post on Whales, True Fans and the Ethics of Free-to-play games for the reasons why.)

So that is why I need your help. I would like an example of:

  • Someone who has spent over £1,000 on a single game. The game can by a social game, an MMO, a series like Modern Warfare, anything, really. It can be about paying money to attend BlizzCon or on buying Collector’s Editions or by splurging on Tower Bux in Tiny Tower.
  • Someone who has spent over £1,000 on a single band, although at least half of it needs to be physical items, not just attending gigs. So I’m looking for someone who bought an autographed album on eBay, owns the boxed sets, has T-shirts from every tour and so on
  • Someone who has spend over £1,000 on a single author: Someone who owns Terry Pratchett memorabilia or paid to hear Neil Gaiman speak or owns signed copies of every book by John Grisham, Bernard Cornwell, Lee Childs, Chris Anderson, anything
  • Television: I’m looking for superfans of Buffy, of The Wire, of Firefly, of The West Wing…

If you can think of someone, but aren’t sure if they’ve spent only, say, £500, that’s fine. The key that I am trying to prove, with anecdotal evidence a la Malcolm Gladwell, is that there are plenty of people, in all aspects of the entertainment industry, whose engagement with content that they love is vastly more than spending £10 on an album, £40 on a game or £25 on a boxed DVD set.

So please, if you can think of anyone, let me know at [email protected]. Please don’t skip past this. I am under a certain amount of time pressure and I need four or five great examples, from all walks of life, in the next couple of weeks.

Keep those emails coming. It will really be a great help.

Thank you.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com