Gamasutra offers some insight from Richard Garriott during the 2007 Independent Game Conference. Richard was asked about the marketing of Tabula Rasa. While he feels the marketing was “fine,” he points out the real problem was himself and the development team by saying what hurt the game was the invitation of too many beta testers before the game was fun enough to be worth playing.
“We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun,” he said, adding, “As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.â€
He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.â€
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PC News on October 2nd, 2007
The Tabula Rasa Website has word from Starr Long that this upcoming MMORPG from Richard Garriott’s Destination Games is going to miss its target launch date of October 19, in spite of it having been declared gold almost a month ago. The new target launch date is November 2, with the head start for preorder customers to begin on October 30:
Many of you have heard my mantra for game development: “Stable, Fast, Fun. In that order.” We need a little more time to make that happen.
To this end we are moving our Pre-Order headstart date to 10/30/07 and our commercial service start date to 11/2/07. This short but critical amount of time will give us time to address several issues including stability and balance as well as allowing our players to test the continent of Ligo (L38+) and our major changes to crafting for a few weeks rather than a few days. Our entire development staff feels this extra time is needed as does our beta community. We feel confident that this extra time will make a difference on launch day.
That said we are excited about launching the game and moving into a “live” environment where the entire future of the AFS is ahead of us. Expect more posts from Richard Garriott, Paul Sage, and other dev staff over the next few days as they discuss plans for elder content and content updates both long and short term. One of us will also be posting to the website every Friday in order to directly address your feedback, which you can submit via the Feedback Form found here on the RGTR.com website.
See you in game as we wrap up this final leg of testing and get ready for the end-of-beta blow out!
