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Is this game marketed?

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8 years ago
Does this game do any advertisement, or is the only source of new players are inviting/forcing (hehehhe, all my friends) into playing this?
+1 / -0
Skasi
CZrankAdminLicho once said he used to run some advertisement for ZK, through google ads iirc. That was stopped a long time ago though.
+1 / -0
iirc, it is the latter
I learned of ZK through other spring games.
+1 / -0
8 years ago
I learned of ZK and Spring trough Bay12 free game list that used to include both (doesn't anymore afaik). While Spring is somewhat known (as Spring Annihilation) ZK is a hidden gem that is well... hidden. Though it seems weird that no reviewer or so stumbled upon it (besides that one german magazine) since there are lots of new players that come to try the game and disappear soon after.
+1 / -0
8 years ago
Yeah, getting advertised is hard enough, getting people to actually play is even more so...
+1 / -0
Skasi
8 years ago

How did you learn about Zero-K?

From a friend 28% (298) 28%
From Spring 43% (462) 43%
From social network 7% (73) 7%
From magazine/blog article 3% (36) 3%
Text advertising on google 0% (5) 0%
Search engine 16% (171) 16%
Wikipedia 2% (17) 2%
I made the Zero-K! 2% (20) 2%
-----(Total votes: 1082)-----
+8 / -0
The only reason I even know this game exists is because I had no access to a Windows computer for a month and ended up googling for Linux compatible RTS games as a temporary substitute for SC2.

Over time I started liking it more than SC2.
+5 / -0
I have very rarely seen any mention of ZK anywhere other than the usual spring places. A few days ago I came across a BA player in the wild but other than that I haven't seen anyone mention spring for months.

quote:
The only reason I even know this game exists is because I had no access to a Windows computer for a month and ended up googling for Linux compatible RTS games as a temporary substitute for SC2.

I came across it while looking at native linux RTS games too. I would be interested to know more about the linux/windows split among people who came across ZK without being told about it specifically.
+1 / -0
Just as many very old players, i have migrated from BA.

Im not entirely sure how i found BA. I think i was reading up on wikipedia's list of free RTS games, as it was during the time no new RTS games were on the market for ages.

I do remember my first game though. It was a 3-way FFA on CCR. I rushed some nab, then started expanding aggressively. Being a Starcraft veteran, i then started building more factories and pumping some cheap generalist units like warriors at the enemy. Which kinda stopped working when my opponent started spamming DDMs.
The fact the game felt so intuitive and natural, and at the same time weird and unintuitive really got me hooked.
I remember the [K] clan often stomping nabs on Tabula. Learning their strategies and trying to beat them was fun, although futile because my teammates were usually random nabs. Regret, Tsuyosa, Jazcash, Dizekat - i still remember the fuckers by the names. As far as i know, Jazcash still plays BA sometimes, and Regret used to be very active in ZK.

Sometimes i got bored of BA, and sometimes the only available room was 8v8BADSD which i couldnt play on my old rig, so i tried to play other games/mods. I think i have at least 2-3 games played in every major mod, like NOTA, XTA, KP, 1944, ComShooter, Kapital, EE, EvoRTS.

I think the final switch for me happened during the first Planet Wars. Damn that was fun. Certainly not balanced, but we had great small community, 3v3-5v5 battles were common and great fun.
There actually was a decline in playerbase after the PW finished, there were dayss with literally 0 CA games played. But slowly the mod somehow grew, it was developing rapidly - the push to remove OTAContent, the name change, the 1faction change, introduction of communism and overdrive. It is a bit sad that quantum and det stopped contributing to the development, the current rate of progress is nowhere close to those old days.

Fuck, i feel old now.

[EDIT]
Oh hey look what i found! CA 2006!
https://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=11156
+5 / -0

8 years ago
+1 for considering comshooter a major mod
+4 / -0


8 years ago
RUrankYogzototh: w.r.t. development speed: Game development will typically go faster at the start, since a lot of systems need to be built and there are a lot of bugs. As the bugs get fixed and the systems solidified, stuff gets more bottlenecked by a few things (often presentation related). At this point, Zero-K pretty much only needs improved visual fidelity (highly time consuming and bottlenecked by artists we have few of) and the new lobby (not as time consuming, but possibly held back by not being easily built and tested with any text editor). The game systems are pretty solid overall, so any changes happening at the pace of early development would be detrimental to quality.
+3 / -0
I was a mod maker back in OTA days. Some of my stuff is still up over at http://urc.tauniverse.com/
+1 / -0
8 years ago
quote:
http://urc.tauniverse.com/

Love how that 11 year old Staber unit is tagged as "new"
+1 / -0
I found Spring in 2005 at Polish TA fansite.
I was looking for unit packs and maps for TA, and if there are any news on whether TA 2 is planned.
Then stumbled across a post about TASpring, described as fan-made TA-like engine with 3D camera and modifable terrain. I downloaded it from TASpring site, run Spring.exe, was building and moving units for 20 minutes, then thought "Oh nice tech demo" and closed it. :P
Only a year later I reminded myself about Spring again, and suddenly noticed it has is multiplayer lobby!
I started playing it in multiplayer and my life changed forever! :D
+1 / -0
I kind of bumbled into it since I have been playing ta since I was two years old. What a glorious year 1997. I still own and play TA. And there is still a community of people dedicated to it. However I kind of ran into zero-k when I decided to finally take a look at this "spring project" I had heard of for such a long time. XD It only took me until a year ago to start playing ZK and having a blast ALL The way. "I enjoy coming up with REALLY oddball stratagems".
+1 / -0
FIrankFFC
8 years ago
So this turned to "How did I find this game" now?
+2 / -0

8 years ago
We're free, we don't have a marketing budget. How would we market it?

So yeah, we allow on word of mouth and people like shadowfury333 kaen and lightman making content about the game.
+2 / -0


8 years ago
I'd say this thread can be both about marketing and origin stories. :)

As for myself, I was a huge fan of OTA since 1997, then at 2005-2006 played many different OTA mods with friends at our school's computer class network. It was at this time I checked out Spring and made my nick, but we couldn't make it work for our lan parties (nobody could host since firewall, and iirc there were no autohosts) so I forgot about it.

Come 2008, I'm looking at Spring again, which looks like an easy way to get some TA action going. While browsing through the list of mods at Spring site, Complete Annihilation immediately jumps out to me as the most interesting one, with all the wacky cool stuff and thought out design philosophies. The rest is history. ;)
+3 / -0


8 years ago
Given that I seem to get ~50 views on each ZK video, and I'm pretty sure those come from existing players, I'm not sure I'm helping that much.

Having Planetary Annihilation: Titans content might help that, though. PA forums are how I realized Zero-K was worth my time (thanks to AUrankAdminGoogleFrog discussing its UI and systems). Here's hoping the game is good enough for more than just one hour of flailing-about FPVOD footage.
+5 / -0
8 years ago
quote:
So yeah, we allow on word of mouth and people like shadowfury333 kaen and lightman making content about the game.

Except that USrankkaen has not released a video in a month and his viewer base is of ZK itself so there is no promotion there anyway and Lightman has not released a vid of ZK in 5 months. Additionally Lightmans' ZK videos are the least popular on his channel.
CArankAdminShadowfury333 has some Achron and Skullgirls fans watching his channel at the very least so there is that.
+1 / -0
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