Table of contents
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- Dwarf Fortress: What Happens When It Becomes A Game? The Zach and Tarn Adams Interviews
- Zach Adams: The way that we marketed the game is that we created a website that had a forum that we'd answer questions on that where people could talk about our games and other games, and that forum became really popular. And it's because of that that we were successful. That forum is really hard to maintain; every day we have to make sure that it's not being run over by trolls or devolving into meaningless arguments. We have to make sure that people are engaged because not only marketing wise this is the reason we're successful because of the forum but also because of the people that help this. There's people that donated their time and helped us rewrite Dwarf Fortress to work on Linux for example or Apple. Without them it wouldn't have happened. So it's like having that forum is the reason we made it.
- Tarn Adams: The way we operated on this kind of contribution based model that wasn't based on sales the forum was sort of you know many times more important than it would be to other people as a form of community building. People that do retail like sales on say steam or something don't necessarily need to have a community at all you can you mean if you if you have a hit it's going to be a hit whether or not you have a community and you'll basically be running from your community in in certain cases right after that you don't want to deal with certain things whereas for us you know cultivating a community over the 17 years is the only reason we're still here–like, the only reason we're still here–and for people that are setting up say a patreon or that are planning to finance their game in some other more amorphous way the people that you're going to be getting money from are the people that are gonna be playing your game and the people that stick around will continue to give you money and it's worth it having a relationship with them and it's led to all kinds of cool things having community these the the fact that we took contributions at all came six years after having a forum and it was from the forum that that idea we didn't have that idea it was an idea that came from the forum.
Advertising
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Billboards
2004.01.21 - Talk at Stanford Technology Ventures Program
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMater ... l?mid=1021
Speaker(s): Max Levchin , Peter Thiel
advertising (billboards) wasn't cost effective b/c it had started to cost $100,000 for 1 month and each sign was only seen for 6-10 seconds
Don't use noreply@yourdomain.com on emails
http://customer.io/blog/dont-use-noreply-on-emails.html
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