Community ad campaign
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I doubt we can bring FL back to its glory days. I recall a day when I wasn’t able to log into my favorite server (Asgard) for hours because of the amount of players. There were hundreds of servers and many dozens of websites, tons of mods and many more under development. I’ve been involved with FL in one way or another since 2004 and it’s easy to see we are in a steep nose dive. We have two things we have to do. 1) Stop the nose dive. 2) Build back a base of players. We’ll never see numbers like we did in '04, but at least we can gain some sort of stable player base.
We need to put together a team (A UN of Freelancer sites and servers) that will represent the program across all sites and actively solicit donations. The reason TSP is ideal for this is because it’s more a general fan site, not server specific. Many servers are protective of their dwindling player base and another server pushing some grand “save FL” idea may not sit well. It’ll also have the added bonus of driving some traffic to TSP. Perhaps we can add a donate link to the URL bar.
The team should consist of a liaison for each site that will make occasional posts about the project. All financials will be transparent and budgets posted publicly so people don’t feel their donations are being used for other purposes (like paying for hosting…). We’d need someone to actually hold the PayPal and Adwords accounts, preferably a trusted member of TSP admin. We would also need a landing page for the ads that provides all the info necessary for someone to get the game and start playing.
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What you’re suggesting, we’ve done what we can to the best of our ability. You say we should go solicit for donations. Where? Anywhere you could possibly list for this action’d kick us out in a second for doing so. As W0d said, this site, which is arguably the most active hub for the advancement of FL in general, doesn’t even get enough in the way of donations to cover it’s own costs, let alone an ‘ad campaign’.
As for your ‘FL UN’ - the Community Bar sites are as close as this is gonna get to what you want. Anything more than that would require some semblance of respect between the major FL communities… which there is not.
I’m not saying that we should give up on FL… but getting money won’t fix our problems. The only way to get FL back on the map is to provide a REASON for it to get back on the map. We at the FW:TOW team aim to do that, as do most other dev teams. The only way to get attention back to FL is to mod the living hell out of it to the point where someone notices and publishes something somewhere somewhat important (alliteration ftw). I suspect that with the eventual public release of FW:TOW’s engine improvements, we’ll see a spike in activity, at least for a short while.
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the only people wou will see when you can release the FT:TW are simply regular reader of the starport website, and other freelancer websites…
Instead of a donation system, you can try to go through forums and boards about spacesims, general gaming, etc and talk about a new evenement in the Freelancer Ground, with eye-candy screenshot of great projects like FW:ToW in order to gather new players
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FWTOW has a relatively large presence on sites such as ModDB, and I know I for one will be sending some links to the local PC gaming magazines to get it, and by extension Freelancer, some exposure downunder. (Once it’s done, that is.
)Sizer makes a very very sound point. Large amounts of people aren’t going to come to a nearly decade old game from some ads on google. They will come from articles and the like on gaming sites, magazines. Things with a huge readerbase.
What’s more likely to get those sites and magazines to cover it? Some insane eyecandy, that’s what. The mods with that sort of thing can and should be submitting their work to these places, because if they are a part of the Freelancer community at large, through the community bar, any expoure for them is exposure for Freelancer.
Also I’m tired so I probably didn’t say anything worthwhile just then. Dx
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Actually does someone consider Ads as serious help browsing through the net an gather valuable information. Me not. Is useless spam that wastes valuable space
Thats also one of the reasosn i stay logged in here in order to avoid getting the ads displayed inbetween the header and forumlist^^Freelancer is not profit driven as most of the work that is done - is done in the sparetime of the individual modding and dev team members. There is no company behind it anylonger…
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If you were a space sim enthusiast would you click on an ad like this:
I think no matter our budget that ad would reach it’s click through limit easily. The tough part is how do we get them the game?
Also, about the sites who’d kick us out for soliciting, we secure the owners permission with the promise that the ad landing page would contain a link to their server/site.
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See, I would not click an ad such as that. I don’t click ads. Most people don’t. The only way we’re gonna generate interest is through searches and a presence on other major sim gaming sites, in fact -
They’re pretty much the major hub for space sims at the moment. If you want to do something useful, go try and get attention there. But spending money on ads is pointless. They’d show up (if you’re using google) when you make contextual searches… in which case they’d find what they’re looking for anyways in LINKS not ads. Gotta generate search meta, not ads. Ads suck.
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Sizer I believe you when you say you wouldn’t click on an ad like that. But I haven’t seen any data backing up your claim that “most people don’t.” To the contrary, I have run Google Adwords campaigns for more than a few years now for various sites and can give first hand testimony that people do in fact click on them. I have even run Google ads for an old FL server (EvolvedOnes) and know for a fact that my measely monthly budget was not enough to keep the ads running for the entire month. In fact, my biggest problem then was the controversy on Eagles admin forum about whether my ads were leeching players from other servers that were displaying Google ads.
Basically what I’m saying is that people click ads. I don’t agree that spending money on ads is pointless. If that were so, there would be no ad market.
I do agree, however, that we should try to generate interest in as many ways as possible including Spacesimcentral, ModDB, etc. Running ads is only one more way to attract attention.
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Why the hell would someone spend money on advertising when there’s no product or service to sell, no cash return. They’d have to be be nuts.
Doesn’t really matter what people can do to freelancer, they’re never going to be able to compete with games of the present day, of which there are new ones all of the time. Most people want to try something new, not buy something old.
Like most of us that still have anything to do with this game, it’s probably because you have an 8 year old disk that still works and still love the game. For others it’s because they haven’t bought a new pc in 8 years so are still playing old games.
There’s no magic wand, no saving fl, it’s old and everything that has a beginning has an end. Just make the most of what it has left in the tank like the FW:TOW team. They’re work is awesome, but even that won’t be able to compete with modern games due to the limits of the 8 year old game they’re working with. It’s never going to be an MMORPG with an ever evolving world, which the way people expect everything other than a COD death match to be.
I’d say personally that the FW:TOW team are nuts for the amount of hard work and lengths they’ve gone to make their mod, it’s insane. But I know they love the guts out of modding the game so they’d do it anyway and that’s cool. When all is said and done they’ll be able to look at their work and think, hell yeah, we made that! Whether it gets the attention it deserves or not will not undo their achievement.
If you’re gonna mod FL, do it for fun, then it doesn’t matter whether you save the game or not.
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Timmy51m wrote:
I’d say personally that the FW:TOW team are nuts for the amount of hard work and lengths they’ve gone to make their mod, it’s insane. But I know they love the guts out of modding the game so they’d do it anyway and that’s cool. When all is said and done they’ll be able to look at their work and think, hell yeah, we made that! Whether it gets the attention it deserves or not will not undo their achievement.If you’re gonna mod FL, do it for fun, then it doesn’t matter whether you save the game or not.
Couldn’t have said it better than you, Timmy. This is exactly the reason why we’re doing this, for fun.
As for attention, well, I think we’ll get a few people back playing FL, at any rate. We almost have 1000 watchers at MODDB, 1100 fans on FB, 220 on Youtube and around 100 on twitter. Granted these fanbases are not mutually exclusive, I wouldn’t say that’s too shabby for an 8 yr old game. Even if we get 10% of these people playing FL again, that’s 100 more people than we have now.
I suspect once we release all the code to the TSP community, we’ll be able to draw back some people to this game we love.
As for advertising it, I agree with what the general tone has been; most likely will be a waste of time and money. Sorry, just being realistic about the situation.
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Sizer wrote:
FW:TOW’s news is not just restricted to TSP and the FL community, beleive you me. We’ve got plenty of coverage elsewhere.not in my country (France)
i f i could have acces to some “advertise” about the mod, tin french or in english (that i can translate" to post to the french community gamers (not specialy spacesim fan, but lots of people will be interested ) -
I agree about visuals. Not that I am playing games only because of it, but I think this might be a mayor reason for a mag reporting about our mod. Note, it might be unlikely that any mag will ever include TOW since there might be issues with the copyright.
So if you are really going to push FL you might want to consider to create a graphics imba mod like Plasmafire and make it public aviable for everyone and for any use.
Oh, and about player collection, you mgiht want to use moddb’s and strategyinformer’s forums as well. You mgiht also get ppl there who don’t watch the main site.
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Back in… 2004 I think, Gamestar.de did a special edition about game mods. They put Evo, along with FLMM and a few other mods, on their cover disc for their “mods” edition of their magazine (there were 4 disks, and 5 mods from Freelancer on one of the disks).
That’s the sort of place you want to “advertise”. Not via paying money (excellent point by Timmy) but by finding out which magazines have previously featured Freelancer mods and are therefore “FL friendly”. Then get into contact with them…
Gamestar were awesome, they contacted me - but the guy was an FL fan and even sent me a copy of the magazine along with a personal note. I think his name was Christian Schmidt, but can’t be sure as the note is at my parents (along with the magazine!).
So, bit of research, drop a few lines - it may pay off. I’ve heard many mods got magazine coverage back in the day (dunno about now), so there used to be interest. Given the scope of changes forthcoming, they may be interested in featuring it simply as a “blimey, look at the effort”.
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Sites like RPS have happily covered mods in the past. It’s no stretch to see them cover a FL mod, especially if you give them incentive in the form of a pre-release copy of some sort.
Also, we have new avenues we did not before thanks to YouTube. There are people making a living off playing and commenting on games through videos. They’ll play indie games and mods and say what their feelings are, it’s a great avenue for advertising; free and far, far more powerful than Google Ads.
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So I guess the idea’s a bust then. If not a single person on this site will support it (except for M1C, thanks homes
), I can’t imagine the trouble we’d run into trying to get support on server sites.I still think the idea has merit, though. Maybe I’ll try it on FP2 and report my findings back here. If it works maybe we can expand it to a community project. If not, I only lost $30 or so for a months ads.
My only hurdle will be how to get the game to new players……
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You can still buy the game, less than a fiver on play.com, still on amazon but more expensive from some of the stores.
I’m wondering if you could just wrap the whole contents of freelancer into a mod and use a custom installer therefore negating the need to buy the game in the first place. Obviously not legal, but who’s looking these days. Nothing generates interest like free stuff!
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I’m afraid we couldn’t condone any of this stuff, Timmy. We simply can’t jeopardize the entire site on the basis that nobody’s looking.
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I’m not a supporter of Sledge’s idea, but i think it’s a good try for our Freelancer.
But…. Freelancer is not free… so it’s just like:
What? Free Space Sim game? Click
“Welcome to the Free Space Sim Game Page,
But… If you want to play this Free game, you have to buy one CD”
Move mouse to the top-right red X bottom ClickCough, Now i’m feel well to be a Chinese in China, because we can: “Come Guys, Have a try the old but GLOWING game, A amazing game by DA&Microsoft – the FREELANCER!!! Download this game HERE, and remember to use our MOD, Download HERE, and Install tutorial HERE, Our server is XXXXXX, see you there and enjoy it.”
But however, we can’t to do here.
I have a idea, we create a page on TSP, a Mod list, and Adwords it using keywords: Freelancer, Freelancer mod, space game, space sim, starwar, discovery, juni etc. This may good that Free Space Sim.
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FriendlyFire wrote:
I’m afraid we couldn’t condone any of this stuff, Timmy. We simply can’t jeopardize the entire site on the basis that nobody’s looking.That’s why you’re in charge and I’m not!
Good job too!How many times is that you’ve told me I’m in the wrong now? I’m sure I should have had a hissy fit, abused you, and after failing to get banned stormed out on my own accord by now lol. Obviously I’m not right in the head.
