Spring RTS Engine

General truths:

• To get more players for your game, advertise your game, not the engine it runs on
• People inherently reduce the perceived value of something that is free.
• Advertising more than one game in the same media can lead to the "100 games for $1" syndrome. This is an extreme version of the above and is incredibly damaging. To pull this off the targets need to already be aware and already have a high value for the games, so that they know theyre getting value for money/time, rather than dismissing it.
• The engine site is not a good place to market to new players. It is a good place to market to new developers and potential developers. The site and media should reflect this.
• This site shouldn't be aimed at showing people what new games they can play under spring. It should be focused on what the games under spring have achieved, where you can see it for yourself, how to do it, and what the engine provides out the box.
• The most effective way to advertise and grow <game name>, is to advertise <game name>, and market <game name>.
• No mention of the spring engine or this site is required to market a game, and the spring engine as a brand detracts, dilutes, and confuses potential consumers for <game name>
• Discussion of marketing to expand the community by acquiring new players is illogical because this is not the players community, this is the spring RTS community. Such talk is offtopic, derailing, and counter productive, leading to misleading ideas and ventures that translate into innefficient and problematic spread of our reputation.
• This community hinges on the success of its child communities, not advertisement of itself. You don't get more spring players, you get more BA players, more Evo players. The success of those subcultures is what drives the influx of new players and developers into the hub, not direct advertisement.

I agree and these are definitely part of my approach. I am curious what neddies research may add.

Its kind of hard to market stolen IP.

And sometimes the engine seems like a never ending story of development.

Make your game cost money, oops servers 'accidentally' go down, guess its free for a weekend, game explodes in popularity, loads of people buy it after the weekend ends, ...?, Profit! Literally!

Minecraft asploded before the free weekend.

smoth wrote:Minecraft asploded before the free weekend.

minecraft is indeed a miracle.an over rated lego game.

sa players/minecraft players.

I am sorry hang on while I drink your bitter tears.

smoth wrote:sa players/minecraft players.

I am sorry hang on while I drink your bitter tears.

lol

Play Braid....its fun game.

stop advertising your games/mods to current spring players and instead aim at the wider RTS gaming community.

its like advertising a new android phone to someone who already has an android phone with a different logo and different default apps on it.

stop advertising the engine to potential players. the player of your game/mod does not give a flying **** about that stuff. keep that info from them until they come to you and ask.

have a separate site or a URL that points to your forum the user should not have to navigate this site ever unless they wish to dev the engine, help with modding or report a bug.

dont use the word TA ever.

expect noobs and HELP them play your game

use a dedicated installer for your mod/game (kernel panic does this well and one of my computer incompetent friends managed to install it just fine without asking me for help well done kernel panic team)

include maps with the installer

have an autohost up (make sure either you the mod dev either owns the host or is a moderator on it) and moderate it in a fair manner (remember to have all the maps you included with your mod)

when the playerbase allows host tourneys, moddeling competions and other events and offer REWARDS (maybe name units after players etc)

theres 10 mins of my thoughts on advertising mods/games

forest_devil wrote:stop advertising your games/mods to current spring players and instead aim at the wider RTS gaming community.

its like advertising a new android phone to someone who already has an android phone with a different logo and different default apps on it.

stop advertising the engine to potential players. the player of your game/mod does not give a flying **** about that stuff. keep that info from them until they come to you and ask.

have a separate site or a URL that points to your forum the user should not have to navigate this site ever unless they wish to dev the engine, help with modding or report a bug.

dont use the word TA ever.

expect noobs and HELP them play your game

use a dedicated installer for your mod/game (kernel panic does this well and one of my computer incompetent friends managed to install it just fine without asking me for help well done kernel panic team)

include maps with the installer

have an autohost up (make sure either you the mod dev either owns the host or is a moderator on it) and moderate it in a fair manner (remember to have all the maps you included with your mod)

when the playerbase allows host tourneys, moddeling competions and other events and offer REWARDS (maybe name units after players etc)

theres 10 mins of my thoughts on advertising mods/games

Help me do this with SA?

braid was too easy

Advertise your Sturmabteilung game yourself.

The problem is nobody's made a complete game for Spring. Nobody wants to jump online and get obliterated - people want to play some nice, easy-to-learn SP gameplay and tutorials before they dive into the blender.

A complete RTS game involves a singleplayer campaign and tutorials. KP and Gundam are closer than most, but they both still have a long way to go.

FPS games can get away with being online-only. RTS games can't - the learning curve is just too great.

s44 would also be a good seller, if it had some tutorials and other single player hold your hand before you get pummeled.

S'44 Market Garden: c. 1700 downloads.
Gundam: c. 7000 downloads.
CA: ? (just guessing: 25K copies worldwide)
BA: c. 1650 for the latest version.

I had more than that total, other than CA for downloads for P.U.R.E. RC7, just on one download channel.

So... what's the excuse for why this engine isn't dealing with SP, exactly? Because these 'truths' look mighty hollow from here.

And what about the fact that, to attain those kinds of numbers (again, last time I checked, total downloads for P.U.R.E. were about 200K worldwide) I had to spend enormous amounts of my time doing marketing tasks, because there weren't any available channels? DIY is for people with budgets and serious time commitment, AF. Even the indie guys who are successful have to deal with this reality.

Moreover, if Spring sees 30K visitors a month... these figures say that most of them don't even download your games. Even BA (which I found pretty surprising). So much for the MP focus being a great plan.

So you game developers agreeing with this are either very stupid, or you don't understand what's happening to you. This engine's management doesn't understand marketing, they're focused on the wrong things, and they don't care about you.

nonsense, I've had bigger download hits than that for individual versions of NTai when the community was half as big. Those download counts are not respective since they're not as old as your download counts, and that content is spread across multiple sites, and systems, a lot of which there are no download counters.

Overall I would say my marketing of NTai 0.2* and XE* were dramatic success stories in comparison to your ventures with P.U.R.E, purely by the download and site traffic statistics recorded.

Show us those numbers.

Moreover... that's an AI... for people to play... uh... SINGLE PLAYER.

You took those numbers from jobjol or what? I think nowadays more dls come from downloading with a lobby probably

Hey Argh perhaps you can work on this with Jazcash:

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23184

@Johannes:

A. They'd have to be online first. Studies show that 90% of the players of RTS never play online at all.

B. Let's presume that that number will give us better numbers, though, or at least fill things out a bit. Where can we get the statistics?

@oksnoop2: It won't work. It doesn't have the traffic. The only 3rd-party 'sites with the traffic to build up are mine and maybe Imperial Winter's (because Spring has been feeding them traffic for free for two years even though their game is still vaporware).

It might work if Spring redirected traffic there, but it would have to be coordinated directly with Spring's leadership.

[EDIT]First check of AIs is pretty grim. Fewer people download the AIs for any given game than download the games. S'44, build an installer that strips out all the AIs but C.R.A.I.G. and includes AppLauncher to let people do SP battles vs. AI- I have a NSIS script if you want, so does Forb. That's clearly vital.[/EDIT]