Steam Promotion

[SneakyFish]

Before I begin, I'd like to say that I'm a longtime player and have owned the game since 2013. I love this game, and desperately want to see it succeed. But in the past year or so, I've noticed that StarMade has begun to slowly hemorrhage players. Servers that regularly had 30+ players now rarely see more than 12.

While there are many theories as to what's causing this, that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to propose a solution, albeit a temporary one, because if the player count continues to decline the game will die out.

I suggest a Steam promotion in the form of a free trial weekend and corresponding sale. There are several similar games I play regularly that I never would have even looked twice at if not for a free trial period. Rising Storm 2, Space Engineers, and Stellaris come to mind. As I said before, I want nothing more than to see StarMade and subsequently Schine succeed and thrive. I'm not here to tell you how to run your company or what to do with your game, as ultimately that's all up to you, but I'm just laying out some ideas that I think would help boost StarMade to where it deserves to be.

 

[apelsinsaft]

The Starmade demo is still the full game FYI. A promo could help bring new players to the game but the current state of the game would probably turn a lot of them away.

I'd wait for the new power systems, sound effects and some polishing of the game experience before promoting the game or you're going to be stuck with the reputation of "that one game that had like 3 sound effects"

 

[JinM]

The devs want to hide the game from the greater audience, because you only have one shot. Like apel said: As soon as you promo a game, everyone who has a look at it, will get one image. This image is not very likely to change, even if the game has progressed after another year of development.

So I am pretty sure they want to wait until the greater core of the game is complete (factions, power+weapon mechanics, planets, universe tick (?), and maybe quests or crew systems).

 

[Crusade]

Promotion of Starmade should happen once the main features of the game are in place, and when we have music and more sound effects.
Previous floods of players have occurred from YouTubers - like Yogscast, flooding the forums to an unmanageable state, with thousands of players giving up on the game because they didn't like the game in it's current state.

I'm sure Schine will do proper promotion and advertising when the time is right. Now is not that time.