Release Threads Discussion

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I agree – as sympathetic as I am to a busy team, and as much as I also think that the email list rather than forum announcements is where the real promotional value lies.

But that conversation should get its own thread, not get slapped onto someone else’s project.

Absolutely! If you as the author like your snarky narrator, then go with it. Not everyone will like any creative choice you make, but if at the end of the day you write something you really enjoy, it’ll find an audience. Don’t hold your instincts hostage to a forum poll of an unrepresentative slice of CoG’s audience.

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Could you elaborate a bit more on the promotional value bit? Do more people read the emails than forum announcements?

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Edit: moved the actual game review to the appropriate thread.

As for the elephant in the room, the first comment started a lot of discourse. While I agree that it could have been formulated less harshly, it still raises a good point. Flame hits the nail on the head, but I would like to add a few things.

Keep in mind that the Passenger has been in the publishing queue for at least a couple of months. Cog knew the holiday schedule, and they committed to launching the game on said date. If there were any staffing problems, I’m sure they could have bumped the date beforehand.

It’s true, people make mistakes. But companies should have processes in place that prevent these mistakes from happening, especially when they get a 75% cut from work that takes hundreds, even thousands of hours to produce. We haven’t heard an official statement from the company, but I’m sure the authors who want to publish their work through HG want to hear how the company plans to ensure that these kinds of preventable mistakes won’t happen in the future so the writers get their stuff promoted as promised.

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The Nascent Necromancer didn’t get a release thread either until I reminded them a couple days after the release date, so it seems to be a reocurring issue.

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But you were a naughty boy, I can see them making an exception for you.

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Everyone –

It’s all me. If someone forgets to post a release thread, it’s just me. No one else.

If I forget to post a release thread, feel free to nudge me. I’m happy to do it. Anytime after the mailer goes out, it’s fine to nudge me. You don’t need to get all passive-aggressive about it. You don’t need to get angry. Just say, “hey, can you please post the release thread?”

That said, release threads don’t do anything for the promotion of the game, so there’s no need to get in a twist about it. Or, if it does do something, it’s miniscule compared to the mailer and the blog post. If I forgot to do those, then I’d understand people getting bent out of shape.

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Yep. It’s healthy for all us fans active on the forum–and on reddit, and Discord–to regularly remind ourselves that we are not that big a share of CoG’s readership.

The new Choice of Rebels thread has already racked up a couple of hundred likes, which is fantastic (and the actual feedback by people who post is invaluable)…but from a marketing perspective, it’s small potatoes compared to the 40,000 people and counting who’ve bought the game. Even mega-successful forum threads, like Wayhaven 3 with its 1,400 likes, will be dwarfed by the number of people who’ve read Mishka’s even more mega-successful games.

The CoG email list, blog, and omnibus apps between them reach a much wider share of CoG’s customer base than anything that happens on fan forums. Access to that market, rather than any specific promotional support, is the main reason we all agree to let CoG hang on to a big chunk of our royalties.

When it comes to marketing, not even all CoG games get all the same bells and whistles. Choice of Rebels: Uprising, for example, never got a trailer with Dan Fabulich growling about the unstoppable power of our imaginations. :slight_smile: But it got the blog interview and (most importantly) the mailer, and it took off… biggest opening day sales ever, at the time. The mass-mail was the main thing that made that possible, promotion-wise.

Publishing with CoG or HG should be as pleasant an experience for everyone as it was for me; it’s more than reasonable for HG authors to want consistent treatment for all games. But the reason a forum announcement thread hasn’t been an entirely consistent part of the HG deal to date is that the forum is not where a game’s success is determined.

(At any rate, not the forum-as-market–the forum as a body of brilliant beta readers, reviewers, and editors is I believe a key part of why my game succeeded).

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Does someone want a release thread for the Passenger still? I’m happy to do it. That said, @pimenita has an active thread going, and I wouldn’t want to split the discussion.

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I’d like to add my own two cents about the importance of release threads in that while forum users may be the minority of the playerbase, release threads are helpful in ways aside from notifications.

I’ve noticed in a lot of release threads that potential buyers use the thread as a way of scoping out other opinions on the works and to determine whether they’re interested in buying, with the review threads perhaps being even more important for hosted games where the games may be more experimental and more of a matter of taste and the WIP threads for the games are several thousands of posts long.

They’re also a way to ask specific questions potential buyers may want clarification on before purchasing.

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May I suggest a release thread for Mage Elite? Unlike The Passenger, it kind of got lost in the shuffle. Aside from the closed WIP thread, it doesn’t have any forum presence at all.

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That’s definitely the case for me because the demo doesn’t always give me the insight I need in order to buy or abstain. Sometimes it’s just a small, off-hand remark that helps me make my final decision. It’s also highly advantageous to get those reader comments as long as there’s still a discount on the game, especially in times when money’s tight.

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What did i miss?

Nah, I’m cool. As you pointed out, TP already has a thread with guides where my players ask questions and share their love and thoughts about the game.

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Voila!

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