tombofsoldier wrote:
Since this has been brought up:
Publicity is something I have some more than passing knowledge of, as well as friends working as professionals in the video game industry doing this sort of thing. So, for now, I'd like to see the publicity kept down to people who understand that this project is far from finished.
Things like the Open Source Software community and the big fans of Morrowind will understand that this is a large undertaking and won't be finished for a while. But that attitude does not extend to the majority of people who play games. They lose their patience quite quickly, and in their minds they are quick to dismiss even a free project as worthless, even when it comes out, due to that.
Black Mesa Source is a great example of what not to do. So many think it's dead or are fed up with their perceived delay that it's release probably won't be nearly as popular as it could have been. Had they not constantly shown off everything they did to everyone they could the story would probably be different. Considering the completion of this project will be a great addition to the resumes of our fantastic coders Black Mesa Source is not something I want to see happen to OpenMw.
So while up until now the general style of publicity has been great, low key and very much "in development" I'd caution anyone against trying to make the project into something it's not yet. Save the celebrations and gushing about it to everyone, everywhere until it nears completion. Personally I've already got a list of Video Game websites and their emails ready for that day, but it's not yet.
Just a friendly reminder of caution in case anyone wanted to go nuts and try and see OpenMw all over the place anytime soon
nicolay wrote:
I absolutely agree with you tombofsoldier, and thanks for bringing up this point.
Publicity has it's upsides, but there's definitely a dark side to it as well. A kind of extreme recent example is Minecraft, which had a huge increase in popularity recently. One of the results of this popularity was a screaming choir of people hurling insults at the creator for not updating the game constantly (and this is a game that is more or less finished already.)
The question really is if we need all that more traffic now. We're not a business, that constantly needs more customers. And adding more coders to a project doesn't necessarily make it finish faster - in fact it usually does the opposite, as is argued in the the old book classic "The Mythical Man Month". And as for users, testers and non-coders, we already have plenty people who have volunteered to help out.
Not saying that we should actively resist publicity, but we don't need to strive for it either. Growing without purpose is never a good idea.
And besides, OpenMW has never had a marketing problem. It's the kind of project that markets itself easily if you just tell people about it. That means we should be very conscious about how and when we tell people about it, since we can't really "undo" it once it's done.
