[Freeciv-Dev] Re: experimental directory

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> The problem goes far beyond "encouraged."  Imagine, if you will, a
> distro with a big checkbox list of things a player could turn on or off.
> And I mean a *big* list, hundreds of things.  Getting people to be
> interested in turning on *your* feature is quite a marketing problem.
> Ergo a brief documentation link by each checkbox is helpful.  Even that
> is not enough, because many players don't care to read hundreds of docs,
> however brief.  And you can't just turn 'em all on, because they're
> experimental and will break things.
> 
> So what authors of such things are going to have to do, is promote their
> thing.  Get people jazzed up about it.  If people catch the Buzz on some
> new feature, then it'll get turned on, it'll get tested, it'll get
> kicked into shape, and it'll eventually make it through beta / release.
> But without active promotion on the part of the author, it will
> languish.  Nobody will turn it on.

I suspect that is the main problem with game engines as compared to 
fixed-definition games. The more different options/games an engine has, 
the smaller proportion of the market/audience plays a particular 
combination, so the less comparable the play, which maybe limits the 
amount that people have in common. Oh you play the same game I do, we have 
something in common. Oh wait the settings you play with are so utterly 
alien to those I play with that maybe we have almost nothing in common at 
all. I suspect one of the things commercial games often have going for 
them is not just that they get lost of marketing but also that they tend 
to have one standard set of rules that is normally the same all the time. 
So even if variant rules are available, nonetheless those familiar with 
the game tend to be familiar with the usual way it is normally played, the 
standard default rules.

I saw this with Xconq, it looked kind of neat to have umpteen games just 
by downloading that one engine, but, the most variants there are the fewer 
of them any one person is likely to get around to trying.

But hey I still like the fact that in FreeCiv we can have utterly 
different modpacks. But as you indicate, marketting is going to be an 
issue as more variants appear. Its all very well to manage to implement 
some favorite scenario, but then you gotta get players for it...

-MarkM-

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