Marketing Games & The Engine, General Truths

[scifi]

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.

well i agree with everything else except this.

You know when people come to the spring website they look at spring as a game, not an engine.
I agree with you, when you say mods should advertise themselves BUT, I fail to see any mods that have advertised alone while having a idependant instaler ex: gundam, evo, kernel panic (sorry if i forget any new mod) getting that huge influx of popularity.

To be completely honest, sites like moddb or self independant websites dedicated to mods, fail completely, people will see a ton of other open source projects first, because they will relate to sites like IGN, or publicity adds e.t.c...

The thing is AF spring needs marketing, it isnt an sugestion its a fact.

I havent been online in a loong time, but my opinion remains the same.

THE project most similar to spring that actualy suceeded is UNITY
it was a freeware engine, when it started, now its one of the most used to make small games e.t.c....

Look at theyr website most of the games made with unity get theyr popularity because people see unity as an engine and because its related games are posted in gaming websites fairly viewed by people, "OH nice engine"-----"OH nice games"-----"i wanna try this"----
"click dl play"---------"3 years later"------- "dev instinct".


But still i got to say spring has some of the best RTSs out there and a low playerbase now interprete as you see fit.

[Argh]

Discussion of marketing to expand the community by acquiring new players is illogical because this is not the players community

There is no "spring player's community" except for this one. That is propaganda spread by people who either ill-informed or have bad intentions.

Go view the forums for S'44, for example- most of the names are people who are here.

This kind of blatant lying by certain people to advance their largely negative agenda is obnoxious but is easily defeated simply by viewing the numbers.

The truth is that this is it.

[AF]

We shouldn't market spring as a game that it is not. Spring is a part of BA but it is not BA.

Argh, I've had in excess of 60k downloads for single versions of NTai, but eitherway your presence here and your points are not productive, and have already been raised by myself and others in various forms, you just never paid attention. For the continued survival of this thread, please refrain from posting and start your own thread.

[smoth]

scifi,
games like starcraft II and warcraft III have way more features than we have.

They use traditional rts systems

Spring uses largely a ta-based system.

gundam doesn't even.

No matter what we do, we cannot compete graphically or featurewise with those games. The games are really flexible and powerful. The average user understands rts gameplay from a starcraft point of view.

Just the other day someone wanted me to add harvesting to gundam... HARVESTING

[scifi]

scifi,
games like starcraft II and warcraft III have way more features than we have.

They use traditional rts systems

Spring uses largely a ta-based system.

gundam doesn't even.

No matter what we do, we cannot compete graphically or featurewise with those games. The games are really flexible and powerful. The average user understands rts gameplay from a starcraft point of view.

Just the other day someone wanted me to add harvesting to gundam... HARVESTING

Then what is there for us to do

[Neddie]

Discussion of marketing to expand the community by acquiring new players is illogical because this is not the players community

There is no "spring player's community" except for this one. That is propaganda spread by people who either ill-informed or have bad intentions.

Go view the forums for S'44, for example- most of the names are people who are here.

This kind of blatant lying by certain people to advance their largely negative agenda is obnoxious but is easily defeated simply by viewing the numbers.

The truth is that this is it.

Actually, about half the people there seldom if ever show up here, but the point stands.

[Argh]

Look, let's presume that your numbers are accurate, even though you've failed to provide any proof.

That's 60K downloads, spread over 5 years. Big deal. I'll probably see more than that with that silly Warband thing even if I abandon it this evening after I update it.

Is Warband wildly successful? Yeah. Do I think that that success was accidental, or wasn't the result of good policy? No.

eitherway your presence here and your points are not productive

That's a laugh. I've already demonstrated that you're not telling the truth, you can't find numbers for us, and your numbers aren't that impressive, even if they're true.

Yet you want to imply that we're not having a productive discussion? Dream on. Only people who are afraid of the truth need fear what I'm saying. If the mods lock it, they're just playing politics, and everybody can judge for themselves what that means.

No matter what we do, we cannot compete graphically or featurewise with those games. The games are really flexible and powerful. The average user understands rts gameplay from a starcraft point of view.

I totally agree with you, Smoth. But the level of success for most of the games is far lower than it can be, nontheless. This can be fixed. But it's not going to get fixed so long as people are defeatist and avoid dealing with the problems we face.

If S'44 had an installer and a front end and a few basic SP skirmishes with 3-4 maps and a bit of help in terms of support from this place, I'll bet we could get them to 50K downloads in less than two months.

They might be able to pull that off through ModDB, but probably not. P.U.R.E. was lucky; the engine's looking older and moldier now; I don't think they'll get banner placement on ModDB (which is the big prize, in terms of eyes).

[smoth]

Well often I think of closing shop but then I see my project as unique. The gundam fans have been super nice and supportive so I don't feel unappreciated.

As far as the spring engine. I think they are working on that. We have ssmf, normal maps, ribbons etc. Mostly there are other things that need to be done. However, I think that much of it falls at the content devs and the shader devs.

The engine is really MORE powerful than starcraft or warcraftIII but most of the *A look like dated garbage. S44 and IW are two of the prettiest and I think evo and gundam are getting there as well.

As far as features and shaders that is coming.. slowly. Features like abilities etc have to be coded and added with seriously time consuming effort. That is part of the boon and bane of spring. Spring has so much potential but getting it working is super effort intensive. I do what I can, bug who I can and CA has done a lot for the rest of us in terms of lups, chilli and the normal map stuff jk made. We have lichos' sd and the sl work from koshi and bd.

Thing is everything is in a stage of WIP. We have not 1 single project that makes people go OOH AAH beyond KP which is very retro and therefor not very modern looking.

I think that all the content devs need to look at our projects NOT compare them to OTA and ask ourselves what looks "wrong" here. We are all missing a certain something that makes our projects visualy click and I personally think it is many many things. However, most of the these things are super work intensive.

So when marketing the engine I think it is best to market it to uber hobbyists. We have kdr and Zwzsg, we need more guys like them who thoroughly break the mold. Zpock was at the cusp and knorke lately has picked up the ball. However, we need more.

I think the devs are doing superb, between jk and kloot I am very happy. Hoi_jui has been great to work with and tobi is THE DON off in some office making offers etc.

I am kinda disjoined in my thought and I cannot drop enough names to talk about all the people I think are pushing the engine.

Fact of the matter is the engine is POWERFUL but inflexible. It takes serious work to take the power of the engine lasso it and make it bend to our will. With each person who tames the engine we come closer and closer to some serious feature sets. Yet NONE of them are part of the engine or readily available.

Argh: I have non spring people regularly join my constantly breaking site. Even in it's constant state of construction for the past year I have seen many many never before seen faces. I think it works fine to try and advertise non-ta projects outside of the spring community here is why:

Spring has earned the reputation as TA2 so people wanting ta come here. It is stupid to try and take those players they are here to play ota and most of the *A projects ride the coattail fame of OTA.

I think this site should move to engine promotion NOT game promotion so we draw MORE CAPABLE DEVS IN who will work with the engine and lua to make spring what it should be.

the games, we can do our own advertising and trying to muddy the forum up with all this gaming crap I feel hurts the engine.

[Argh]

Spring has earned the reputation as TA2 so people wanting ta come here. It is stupid to try and take those players they are here to play ota and most of the *A projects ride the coattail fame of OTA.

Even they aren't doing that well. I was surprised, honestly- I thought BA would be pwning the numbers by a huge margin.

I think this site should move to engine promotion NOT game promotion so we draw MORE CAPABLE DEVS IN who will work with the engine and lua to make spring what it should be.

How are we supposed to do that without games and audience figures that are more attractive? Top-level devs want to work on something juicy. Spring's allure is fading, the OTA stuff looks old. The new stuff, on the other hand, has no audience.

And even if we did... what kind of success story is that? "Oh, that engine's wonderful, too bad I can't find a game to play that I liked." The vast majority of people who arrive here aren't looking for an engine... and conversion of people from players to modders is a percentages game.

So when marketing the engine I think it is best to market it to uber hobbyists. We have kdr and Zwzsg, we need more guys like them who thoroughly break the mold. Zpock was at the cusp and knorke lately has picked up the ball. However, we need more.

There aren't nearly enough of those, Smoth. I mean... let's face it, we're freaks. I'll bet you that there aren't more than 100 of people like you worldwide, and most them, like you, are very focused on their subject matter. I've seen that kind of focused hobbyist stuff on flight-sim titles and train sims and historical stuff, but it's not like there are thousands of those people, and most of them obviously aren't into RTS.

The engine needs to either be aimed lower-tier or it has to be aimed at pros. I think the former's smarter and easier to achieve than the latter atm, but it can't be done without some pretty important changes.

As for the names... KDR's stuff was never polished and had no audience outside hardcore game-design geeks. Could that have been very different, if the games had gotten polished? Yeah. But it never happened. And I'll bet we can't find 10 of him anywhere- they're all working on stuff like OGRE and Unity.

Zwzsg's game hasn't been able to find a big audience, and will not achieve breakthrough without help.

[Argh]

Who the f*ck gives a shit about players who play single player?
Maybe you since your making money with PURE.

everyone else needs players ONLINE playing multiplayer.
Nobody cares about those 90% who never play rts online.
you are talking with people that have a completely different agenda than yours and its obvious...
most here want to play their game or their game of choice online with other players not simply see the number of downloads and $ go up...

If 90% want SP, and you need to get that 10%... you can get MORE if you have that 90% in the first place.

Starcraft, for all it's MP glory, is mainly played SP, after all. You basically don't understand the numbers behind new players at all, and neither do the people in charge. By focusing so much on MP, they've hurt themselves very badly.

@AF:

Not happening.

It's not my fault that your 'truth' has foundations of sand.

Now either directly answer my points, where I've demonstrated that your "5-minute" figure is actually totals, and that the total downloads page clearly demonstrates this, or say something constructive here.

The games aren't failing to find an audience because we don't have site traffic, AF. In fact, if we accept that 30K figure, they're saying something really scary, which is that most new users don't even get a game and start playing.

They're failing for three reasons:

1. The engine doesn't have good SP support. Not even a front end that is explictly designed to support SP gaming and is easy to configure for each game. We can't even re-skin the current one in a major way, like having different pictures for the buttons, and it can't be configure to auto-choose an AI or exclude scenarios or anything.

I mean, seriously... when AppLauncher and zwszg's SP interface are the best things we have, and they were developed mainly out of desperation... things are fubar.

2. The devs have repeatedly failed to re-examine their worldview- hence the famous statements about how "lobby numbers are all we care about".

3. There's no marketing support for the games, there's no drive to find audience for games in general, because, ooh, we might not focus on the engine so much. Wow, that's a conveniently circular argument, but it's failing.

And here you are, repeating these convenient phrases which avoid the truth, which is that Spring is largely heading for failure. Even if it's a lie... just keep saying it, and it will make it so. As the guy everybody loves to hate, as the guy who everybody loves to examine every statement to death in search of the most minute errors or bad phrasing... it's pretty amusing to dish out this level of the truth, only to find that people simply don't want to hear it.

[Gota]

I edited my post but here it is again.
Yes if a million people play your game in single player the chances multiplayer pips will know about it are bigger but you can also achieve this by simply advertising your game in the right circles where multiplayer crowds roam.

YOU want to get the bigger chunk of single player players to buy your game so you are pushing this while most here dont make money of their projects and what matter is online presence.


the fact is no project here advertises at all!!!!

most of the rts multiplayer crowed has no idea this place even exists.
Neddie can do his "researches" and you can try and push for single player for bigger profit but to truly get more multiplayer people a project just needs to get out there and it's devs need to spend time just creating a lot of noise and presence in the right places and maintain that for a while.

Now enough with this silly thread.those that care about getting players for their game enough will go out there,spend time and advertise it those that don't wont.

[FLOZi]

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.

MG has been out only a couple of weeks. S44 custom installer is coming (We've had once since AT LEAST 1.06 Lyuban; Over a year and a half ago!) once the kinks have been ironed out of this release.

Anyway, I strongly suggest everyone add Argh to their Foe list.

BOYCOTT ARGHPARTHEID.

[Argh]

MG has been out only a couple of weeks.

Fair enough. See people talking it up around here? Excited people wanting to get it working with an AI? Tales of how it's swept the MP space clean?

Neither have I.

So, why are you defending defeatism? MG's a good game. Why are you content with the current situation?

I mean, seriously... wtf. I'm not your enemy or your problem here. I'm pretty confused.

What "arghaparteid"?

What the hell is wrong with you? Do you just want to fail so that you can defend the status quo and be comfortable with me as the enemy?

Are you guys really that crazy, that you can't dare think about success, or advocate for things that could help you, because ooh, that'd be horrible and "commercial", even if you're just finding a playerbase and you never make a dime by "exploiting" anybody?

What kind of self-defeating bullshit is that? How do you justify that?

Yes if a million people play your game in single player the chances multiplayer pips will know about it are bigger but you can also achieve this by simply advertising your game in the right circles where multiplayer crowds roam.

Er... the "places where multiplayer crowds roam" are the same places SP players roam. The idea there's some magical pool of MP players that Spring can advertise to (as an engine, no less, LOL) is very silly. The few websites that serve as MP "connectors" don't allow games to advertise at all, or they want big bucks for banner ads, btw.

YOU want to get the bigger chunk of single player players to buy your game so you are pushing this while most here dont make money of their projects and what matter is online presence.

No. In fact, I'd be happy to not be allowed to use this place for marketing, if that's a real concern. And I'd still be yelling my head off.

the fact is no project here advertises at all!!!!

Again, incorrect. KP, S'44, CA, etc. have all done marketing, Gundam's gotten ModDB announcements posted, etc.

So basically you aren't paying any attention to what's been going on at all. They've been trying. It's largely ended in failure. I could blame the game developers, but frankly I don't think they're the big problem.

[Hobo Joe]

That reminds me, I should update the BA installer I made


@Argh, SP and MP players rarely mix. Most SP players don't 'roam' anywhere, they just play the game. MP players are a completely different group, especially in RTS.

[Argh]

@Argh, SP and MP players rarely mix. Most SP players don't 'roam' anywhere, they just play the game. MP players are a completely different group, especially in RTS.

Fair enough. But there's still no good way to advertise to them, if you don't have money, and Spring can't do it because it's not a game, it's just an engine.

1: I asked you to leave my thread, this has been done in the past and backed up by moderator action. As the original poster of this thread I asked you to leave, and explained why.

That rule's supposed to be flexible, not a muzzle people can use for when a debate's not going their way. I've raised a bunch of inconvenient facts for people to see, and they make your central argument incredibly hollow.

Moreover, it's the height of hypocrisy when people who like to do this to others can't take their own medicine.

2: I never disputed that they were totals, I never claimed they were anything other than that, this is something you raised all on your own.

I don't think anybody reading your "5 minutes" remark will be convinced of that. It doesn't make any sense otherwise.

3: Spring has thousands as demonstrated by statistics set up by Fnordia showing we get tens of thousands of page impressions every month. It is a problem of user retention not attraction.

Thousands of what, exactly?

People who view the front page, can't find a game, are confused about what they're supposed to do to explore things and leave?

People who think it's just an engine and then leave because they were looking for a game to play?

People who download the engine installer and then don't have a game?

People who were looking for SP titles, and can't find any, because the only one that's ever been done (at least in the classic sense) is not even mentioned until you get deep into the Wiki, because the powers that be have allowed other people here to trash him, his project, and everything associated with it as and when they please, to the point that people won't dare mention it, if they aren't saying something hateful?

I mean... hell. The Demo's free, it's not adware or timed, doesn't require registration or anything of that sort. MP's 100% free, and if it runs... that unfortunately being "if"... then it's hours of SP for free, MP for free. Yet, omg, I can't even talk about it.

What do those numbers mean, AF? You don't have an answer that will satisfy anybody, given the numbers I've shown about what happens when we look at total downloads for the games.

[Johannes]

Theres 1000s of different people who visit the lobby at least, for 1 stat.

And theres ways to advertise to MP rts players but atm I dont feel like doing it... Download page is confusing for example, pathing is total shit atm, I don't want to go tell people to try this cool game that just happens to be momentarily broken for an indefinite time. Needs some polish.
When I can just drop a link and trust that a lot people won't get a negative first impression, then I feel much more like spreading the word around.

[Forboding Angel]

BUT, I fail to see any mods that have advertised alone while having a idependant instaler ex: gundam, evo, kernel panic (sorry if i forget any new mod) getting that huge influx of popularity.

Scifi, Evo is still in alpha. I haven't advertised it much. The site still gets an assload of hits per day regardless though. Download page being the most.

Also, Evo doesn't ahve an easy installer yet because 82.x is still in the works and a bunch of other shit that happened with this spring release. I am one guy doing the majority of the grunt work that lays the foundation for this crap. Any time you wanna donate some time, let me know.

[SirArtturi]

Yes if a million people play your game in single player the chances multiplayer pips will know about it are bigger but you can also achieve this by simply advertising your game in the right circles where multiplayer crowds roam.

Er... the "places where multiplayer crowds roam" are the same places SP players roam. The idea there's some magical pool of MP players that Spring can advertise to (as an engine, no less, LOL) is very silly. The few websites that serve as MP "connectors" don't allow games to advertise at all, or they want big bucks for banner ads, btw.

True. Likewise, Singleplayer feature does not only introduce the game for a bigger target group but introduces the game for potential mp group to learn the game. Don't be so conditional. SP will bring many positive things to the scene. Especially if the SP features are carried out with the idea of tutorial function.

[Argh]

This thread is not about download counts and statistics.

No, it's about your "general truths", which are based on false premises and aren't backed up by the numbers. If you want to present a theory, let alone an axiom, then I think it's quite healthy to examine it.

I'm not mad at you personally or anything. I'm mad at the community of people who have chosen to spread these ideas and present them as conventional wisdom, without actually examining the results.

Moreover, this set of false assumptions is ruling policy, which has very serious implications.

If we want game developers, who's going to want to build nice stuff nobody plays? Nobody. Right now, I'd have to advise anybody thinking about building anything larger than a minor research project or tech demo that this is not a good engine for them. It's harder than most to build stuff for, and when you finally get done, you will be facing total apathy and lack of community support- and that's if people here like you.

Theres 1000s of different people who visit the lobby at least, for 1 stat.

Last time we looked at those numbers, it suggested that most of the "thousands" were hours clocked by a much smaller number of people- the stats tracking doesn't track individuals, IIRC, but hours logged. However, let's see if there are numbers on individual logins before presuming that what I've said is correct.

But if it's thousands online, my question is, what are they playing? Not BA, or there'd be higher download figures. And that's still the vast majority of what's being played.

My best guess is that less than 1000 people sign in a week, and probably more than 30% aren't retained more than a week. But let's see some numbers on this.

And how are you going to advertise for online players? Enlighten us. Last time I looked at this issue, it was a little over a year ago, and what I found was that:

1. You obviously can't advertise Spring games on other online games' sites- it's usually specifically forbidden by the TOS.

2. The online "aggregation" sites, for "communities of online players" also don't allow solicitation, or are designed specifically to prevent it if you haven't paid big bucks to talk to their customers.

So, where are you going to communicate with this audience? A few hundred guys in clan forums won't cut it- marketing needs to reach at least 10K people for 1K results, and that's if you're doing a great job. I just don't think that's realistic. One-guy-at-a-time marketing isn't going to change things dramatically. Moreover, they'll all just be gravitated to the BA monopoly, so I don't think it solves much, from the game developers' standpoint.

[Gota]

@batookmahplayez
You cant ask people not to play other games on the spring engine if your project shares the same server and your players join the same lobby as players of other projects.

If someone truly wants a segregated community than he needs to setup his own server.

Marketing for such tiny no profit projects in their infancy must be constant and must have tools around it to help players get in there...

A project needs it's own installer it's own website and showcase videos.
Post showcase videos where can make open source lists with your project on top etc etc etc...
Marketing is as much of an assignment as actually devving,especially since no spring project can match commercial titles in bling which is the easiest to market.
I'm sure for those that look there are ways to get your game heard of.

Of course for multiplayer oriented games like the ones in Spring you need a slick multiplayer lobby and the most user friendly lobby in spring, with auto downloads is still very confusing and unintuitive(very different from how other lobbies work).