Game Developers listen up! Many of you with games in development have hordes of slavering fanboys who follow every tiny change or rumor regarding your product. These are loyal fans who will do virtually anything to help ensure the success of their chosen object of devotion. Use them.

            There are countless examples of how not to accomplish this: Master Of Orion 3, ADOM, and Melee Online are 3 games which I have personal experience with as a devoted fanboy. Each of these games had a hard-core following of various size with MOO3 topping the number list. MOO3 had a hellishly long development cycle which was hallmarked by incredible droughts of information.

            It doesn’t take much guys. Honestly there is no reason to allow 1 week, 2 weeks, a month, or a season to go by with nothing. Just plop a one-liner into the forums, web page, email list, etc… and the fanboys will jump on top of ourselves to prop you up with praise and support. God forbid you might even include some minor tidbit about how the development is going! What would that be like hmm? Seriously though the guys at MOO3 would have been happy just to hear “We are still employed and working on the game.” from the devs once a week rather than the months long complete blackouts we received.

            Ignoring the rabid core of your fanbase like this can have disastrous consequences. MOO3 did such a bad job of fanboy management that by the time the game went gold (which took 2 weeks to be reflected in one line of text on the web page) the fans were already poisoned against it. Couple this with a rocky launch requiring severe gameplay tweaks and you have a dead game that as in production for more than 3 years. Had they kept us in the loop a hell of a lot more of us might have stuck it out through the 3^rd patch and actually helped spread the word. Instead MOO3 remains a testament to poor fan relations.

            ADOM suffers similarly as Thomas Biskup (who is incredibly talented) often goes months without a single peep regarding what he is up to. The fans of ADOM are so devoted that by and large we have stuck it out despite this but every time he promises to keep us informed and then fails to do so he loses a few more folks. Since Thomas does eventually hope to turn ADOM into something commercial this is an especially bad idea. Get us involved Tommy! Hell, sponsor a fan art contest or two! You could even have soe of your longer term fans run it for you so you wouldn’t even have extra work. Just endorse the damn thing and the art would fly in! (He needs graphics eventually) Update the page once a week with at least one sentence. We are easy to please my friend.

            The smallest game of my examples Melee Online sprang from an old BBS door game wherein you played the role of a gladiator in a professional league. For it’s time it was revolutionary and still remains one of the most engaging door games I have ever played. When I heard that he had in fact re-launched his game and was updating it to be a stand alone I was ecstatic and started a Melee Renaissance in my platoon. In no time flat we had 3 people playing on a BBS run out of my house and were organizing hotseat Melee tournaments on weekends. The dev was out of contact in much the same way as the aforementioned devs were but he did release a new build on schedule to 3 “testing” BBS’s. He did not however check with any of these BBS’s to see if they worked, didn’t check his own forums (click to view the sad wreckage (also check out the last poster in 2 of 4 forums)) to see his fan base grow quickly and then die even more quickly, and didn’t even provide an email address to contact him with! Hence his fan base went away. (even the comments on his web postings are disabled…grrr.)

            Don’t squander your hard work and long nights spent coding because you couldn’t figure out how to write a one sentence update every week. Let us help you out. This is just bad business sense ruining solid programming and development work.