As you might have noticed, this place isn’t vibrant with activity just yet. So we have to get the word out to get more people to find us.
Here’s the thing: Our other game AirlineSim can do almost completely without marketing because there are quite a few people that simply enter “airline simulation” into Google and our game is among the top hits. There’s no such luxury for Prosperous Universe: For potential players to find us, we need to be visible in gaming communities, on news pages and YouTube channels. At the same time, PU is a niche-y game, so just sending out PRs to general gaming websites probably won’t help in any way…we need to contact special-interest pages that deal with sci-fi (games), browser-based games, business simulations etc.
So my question to you is this: Which such outlets do you know of? Which communities are you active in that might be interested in the special mix of topics that is PU?
I’m pretty sure that cross-promoting would be valuable for you guys. Mutual shoutouts with similar projects (video games, films, series, books, maybe even board games) can do wonders, and if you’re lucky, even one or two influencers like sci-fi authors or bigger niche-y Youtubers might get on board that way. You could write them directly if their projects inspired you and hope for a shoutout.
I’m not aware of any projects that are both similar and still in early development. If you think your game will appeal to the “hard sci-fi” crowd, try the community of The Expanse, it’s currently growing and very active thanks to the TV series. The setting of the books was originally developed for an MMO, not a book series, so maybe you can fill the void of that game that never saw the light of day? If you play it right and get lucky, @JamesSACorey might give you a shoutout.
The space subreddit is pretty awesome, too. Maybe you can sneakily drop a mention of your game here and there, although self-promotion is a touchy subject on Reddit.
Edit: The Kerbal Space Program community might be interesting as well. I can imagine Scott Manley doing a Youtube video about your game.
Edit 2: Space Engine (spaceengine.org) might be suited for a mutual shoutout!
Might give MMORPG.com a try. While they are more involved in RPGs, I’ve seen other MMOs advertised/previewed/interviewed there. AFAIK it’s got a large readership base as well. Worth a try!
Thanks for the ideas @Mjeno! Cross promotion is a great way to spread the word and we have thought about it too! I guess we start by writing a list of promising projects/authors and try to get in touch.
@martin and I are both big fans of Scott Manly and we are hoping that he’ll do a video about PU sometime in the future. But we are also aware that we don’t have many shots in pitching the game to him (or other youtubers for that matter). The current game’s status is development and we are not sure when the right time for a pitch would be!? I guess the game should at least be in Early Access, so that if a viewer of his channel can join the game if interested. Also the content for a proper video would only be there if there are enough players in the game. It’s like a chicken and egg problem.
Yeah, those are some very good points you raised; you should wait until Early Access before you approach influencers. The earlier stages should probably be very community-centered to gain some momentum. I’ve heard a good talk by Philomena Schwab at this year’s Quo Vadis, she’s really good at that stuff. She’s put a lot of advice (and even her master thesis on the subject, see “THESIS”) on her website: http://philo.me/na/
I’m not sure if that’s common practice anyway, but maybe it would be an option to populate the game with some bots in its early days? It would get the economy going and the players would have some more “people” to interact with.
sadly i’m not a big user of reddit or forums(beside PU ;)) so no sugestions here from me. And also scott Manley got allready mentioned so thats left me with only one point on my list: your Own YouTube channel, its a little bit early but i think many of the younger gamers and people with less time, use YouTube as an platform where they get information and inspiration from, with less cost of time cause the information is allready preprocessed and you see most of the time what you hear so it get deeper into your mind so maybe some early looks into the game from your side with us as a smal stating community get people on board and also some dev diary thing or so, less frequent as on your blog could also be nice.
If you have some questions or need ideas for that let me know i will try my best to support you.
Thanks @Mjeno! I met Philomena once myself, but didn’t know about her thesis. Will check it out!
About the bots: Ideally everything in PU should be produced and traded by players. But since that may (and probably will) produce problems, especially when the game starts, we implemented trading bots that supply the growing economy with the most basic commodities. We hope that no player will get “stuck”, in the early game. We also tend to keep the list of these commodities as short as possible. Internally this is called the economy bootstrapping problem
Of course we could use these bots more extensively to create artificial activity in the game. Right now they are just faceless traders, but we could make them look like a player lead company. But that is probably a topic of its own.
Hi,
i didn’t knew the dev blog of Production Line, but after i watched them it looks like we are talkig about the same.
To the bot/AI point maybe it will be a good idea to try it and test if and how much bots are needed to get started.
I’m sure there will be a few people that will help you Testing with this
I think the bot topic is something for a separate thread, so back to communication:
My personal favorite among the video devlog series is definitely the one by Introversion for Prison Architect. It’s not going on anymore since the game has been out of Alpha/EA for a while now, but I greatly enjoyed it while it lasted. It was a monthly thing and to a large extend driven by the particular entertainer qualities of the two main devs. So I’m afraid it’s something that can’t be easily reproduced.
That said, I’m almost certain that we’ll have to do regular video updates eventually. You simply can’t do without them nowadays. But producing a video, even a very simple one, takes a lot more effort than writing a blog post. You have to record it, probably do a few takes and/or cut out mishaps, do some cutting to add logos, links, etc. and then upload it. So all in all, I’m sure doing a 20 to 30 minute video log would consume around 2 to 3 hours of time for each episode. That might be too high an estimate because I don’t have a lot of experience, but I did a few videos for AirlineSim in the past and it always felt like a relatively cumbersome process.
So maybe initially, a “monthly review” format would be a good idea. It’s not too often but still frequent enough to illustrate the changes described in the four weekly devlogs that should usually have been released between two episodes.
I got a little addition: It may be only a tiny chance, but perhaps you guys will find a way to reach the community of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Odyssey? It’s an upcoming VR title on the colonization of a solar system.
Great that you found your way here! I don’t know exactly what we did to deserve it, but MassivelyOP has been reporting on our game two weeks in a row now… Let’s hope they keep it up.
If you play it right and get lucky, 
so maybe some early looks into the game from your side with us as a smal stating community get people on board and also some dev diary thing or so, less frequent as on your blog could also be nice.