Marketing Plan Plan

[SinbadEV]

There are three main reasons not to promote ÔÇ£springÔÇØ.

First: A large number of people would not be able to play the most popular game without treading into ÔÇ£questionable intellectual propertyÔÇØ territory regarding ported content.

Second: The engine and games for it, while very playable, lack a certain amount of ÔÇ£somethingÔÇØ that would really make them shine. People tend to waffle on what this ÔÇ£somethingÔÇØ is, be it barriers to new player adoption like lack of tutorial campaigns or GUI or stability issues or whatever.

Third: That the ÔÇ£engineÔÇØ shouldnÔÇÖt be marketed directly because it is the responsibility of game makers to promote their own games/content.

With those out of the way, we all want more people to come, try spring and realize how awesome it is and stay to make or contribute to games or become regular players or perhaps even contribute to the engine/lobby development... so that informs my desire to suggest a ÔÇ£Marketing PlanÔÇØ.

(First off, you all need to read ÔÇ£the tipping pointÔÇØ which should be available at any bookstore or library... yeah IÔÇÖm a few years late but its still a good book that applies to the situation.)

Anyways, step one is to make our ÔÇ£ideaÔÇØ ÔÇ£stickyÔÇØ... which means coming up with a way to present Spring that makes sense to people and ÔÇ£sticksÔÇØ in their heads long enough to get them to ÔÇ£try it outÔÇØ and ÔÇ£get into itÔÇØ .This could involve ÔÇ£fixingÔÇØ some of the barriers to entry but will also involve coming up with a clever way of presenting the idea. It might make sense to ÔÇ£auditÔÇØ our user experience from ÔÇ£hearing aboutÔÇØ to ÔÇ£adoptionÔÇØ and figure out what things need to be adjusted to smooth over the conversion.

Once we have ÔÇ£refinedÔÇØ our message we need a way to get it out. While any ÔÇ£word of mouthÔÇØ campaign these days involve things like twitter, facebook and blog tours, it is also important to actually use our mouths to spread our message, telling people about the spring engine in such a way as to transfer your enthusiasm to your friends and family.

So, any ideas how we can go about this?

[knorke]

First & Second read like "Spring has less games than PS3"

Third: That the ÔÇ£engineÔÇØ shouldnÔÇÖt be marketed directly because it is the responsibility of game makers to promote their own games/content.

so where do the game makers come from

[SinbadEV]

First & Second read like "Spring has less games than PS3"

Third: That the ÔÇ£engineÔÇØ shouldnÔÇÖt be marketed directly because it is the responsibility of game makers to promote their own games/content.

so where do the game makers come from

Yes, that is why I promptly ignored those points immediately after stating them.

[knorke]

okay?
well I* would promote the engine as engine, make better docu, more game makers will come, more original & good content gets made, ???, profit.

*i wont actually do anything lolz

[KaiserJ]

no "finished" games free of TA IP

marketing to anyone other than a developer is foolish currently

[smoth]

Each project has it's own direction wrt marketing.

As kaiser said we have many projects in varying states of active and on hold development.

As far as drawing new devs, I think the community is too big an asshole for it. Any time the *a tards have felt threatened by a project they turn to derision. This is demotivating.

[zwzsg]

no "finished" games

At what point does a game is "finished" according to you?

TA IP

You make it sound like some TA stealing mods are finished, which makes no sense, since I've never seen any *A mods (except maybe CA) as finished as 44/GRTS/Pure/KP/Cursed/...

currently

So what, let's wait another five years? Spring is already getting outdated, it won't get any hotter. Marketing should have been done two or three years ago, it's already too late and it won't get any better.

[KaiserJ]

my apologies, kp is a finished game, with marketing external to spring. it didnt spring to mind.

with the other games you've mentioned though i doubt were we to ask any of the devs about their current status they would claim to be anywhere near finished. maybe that's just my ignorance.

edit: i would contend that BA is finished, other than small balance adjustments and compatibility updates

i dont disagree with what you're saying.

[Neddie]

Well, a fully finished game is a dead game. As long as there is a stable release which the developers and players accept, then the game is functionally finished - like the current version of TF2 or League Of Legends.

[zwzsg]

i doubt were we to ask any of the devs about their current status they would claim to be anywhere near finished

True, but it would still be foolish to wait for the dev to call their game finished to start marketing. First, because like Neddie says, games can only exist in two state: Not yet finished, and dead. Secondly, because words like "beta", "alpha", "not finished" have lost their meanings. Minecraft is still labelled alpha, Gmail lost its beta label only last year, and yet their marketing was widly successfull. Let's not even get started on the "paying beta" practices of some publishers.

[smoth]

But but claiming gundam is a beta let's me have an excuse when I fuck up!

Truthfully, I think gundam is prettier than ba but still lacks polish. Until I replace all my 3do models I will lament the level of incompletion. It is very playable but it needs more zazz, if I could just well, zazz it up maybe?

[Karl]

How about adding support for Translation?
Many other Freeware/Open Source Games
Can be Translated

Which Spring lacks thereof
that should get some more Players not everyone is able to Speak And/Or understand english language well

[smoth]

That is a good suggestion and the ca team is working on support for that I believe. However it still means someone has to translate things, that is part of the problem. Not even considering things like unit acks

[Wombat]

im actually suprised that in so many previous threads ppl clam that most games are unfinished.

KP, Gundam, Cursed, EvoRts, S44, hopefully zero-k soon + lot of smaller games.

isnt it enough ?

[knorke]

CA has some translated ingame texts I think. But I doubt many players quit spring because it is english...

As far as drawing new devs, I think the community is too big an asshole for it. Any time the *a tards have felt threatened by a project they turn to derision. This is demotivating.

*a devs or *a players?
new devs would not have the problem of longgoing hates and generally the community is quite cool imo.
Even if I think some projects are going in the wrong direction everybody is helpfull and friendly, i like it.

about the games:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 5&start=43
Yes some nice stuff and blabla but in the end ask yourself: Do you check out every halfdone halflife mod? No, because for the average gamer its not worth it.

Anyway nothing usefull will come of this thread, like the last ones of its kind. Just keep dreaming about "the big web 2.0 marketing stunt" and Imperial Winter Forever that will suddendly make spring superfamous.

[Karl]

No but maybe we can scratch some more Players or makign somehow more popularer by making Translation support

imo if Spring had that earlier we would have more players

[hoijui]

SpringLobby has translation support since quite some time, and it is translated to over 90% on multiple languages already (by the community). so actually getting spring translated should be feasible, i think.

[Karl]

Well i actually meant for Mods to using maybe a Folder on the Root of it
something like this .../Spring/Translation/Modname/Language Folders
that should be fleasible instead of making it on mods directly due to obvious reasons

[zwzsg]

You're supposing mods have their text string easy to locate. This is not the case, strings are all over the place, and there's absolutly no way the engine can know if a string found in a lua is a text to be displayed, a filename, a mod option or whatever. The text can even be procedurally generated.

If a modder was sufficiently motivated, he could list down all the place that display text in his mod, neatly put all his text string in variables and add a function to pick a different string depending on player's nationality. I mean, it could be done by a modder, just lots of work.

[koshi]

Maybe a CA dev could comment on why they chose the translations approach they did, instead of gettext for example? With gettext support you could leverage a lot of already existing toolchains. Also there's http://www.transifex.net/ which I've moved SpringLobby's translations to from launchpad.net a short while back. Transifex allows for very easy integration of contributed translations.