Lo-Fi Games

As many of us know, the game is not hugely popular or well known, while this will probably change when the game is released on steam that day is a long way away.

Hence I have decided to list down ways and means of spreading the game to a wider audience, if you have any ideas to add, please inform me either via PM or on this thread.

Social Media sites-
Let's look at the cold hard facts; 62% of the Human population uses some sort of social media site, that is 4,340,000,000, or 4 billion, 340 million. In those 4 billion people, there must be a large potential playerbasse for this game, in order to "unlock", or rather to tap into this potential playerbase, we as a community need to increse our activitiy on sites such as Facebook, twitter,google+, instagram, and any other social media sites that we may come into contact with.

Youtube

(Please note that while I am speaking about youtube in this section, the princible applies to other video sharing sites.)

Again, the facts speak for themselves:
Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth

Those figures are quite terrifying to say the least, and many an indie game has been made by being featured on youtube, many games have achieved widespread popularity because of youtube, and just a few examples are games such as Minecraft, Towns, Terraria, and various others. Individualy, there is not much that the "average joe" can do, games are usualy promoted by big time youtubers like Total buscuit or the yogscast. What we "could" do is try to get famous youtubers to create videos highlighting the game, or alternitivley, we could create a "Kenshi LP" that although would probably only reach a small audience, still promotes the game in some way.

Internet forums.-

Forums, another popular method of online communication, a way we can promote the game while on another forum is by doing relitivly simple things, having a forum sig/banner that links to this website, creating an off topic discussion about the game could also generate publicity for the game, over time, simple things like this can realy add up.

We also have a subreddit http://www.reddit.com/r/Kenshi/ that we could try and generate more interest on, Reddit has millions of unique views every day, if we could get something upvoted enough so that it reaches somewhere where it can be viewed by a large amount of people, we would be helping find a wider audience. (Yes I know that reddit is technicaly not a forum, it just has properties similar to a forum so would fit in this section nicely.)

That's all for now, but as I said at the start of the post, feel free to contribute, also, if I have made any grammatical or spelling mistakes during this post, I would be greatfull if you'd tell me about them.

~T.

It's very, very difficult to use social media to reach people effectively. You can't reach everybody, you have to have a target audience in mind.

I think that Kenshi (aka Chris) should create a twitter account. I personally, would like more info on the progress of the game. With a twitter account, it'd be possible to give periodic, small updates on how the game is progressing. Maybe even a picture of a new art concept or weapon/armor every now, or a little bit of text explaining what is new or planned.

Also, I feel that promoting a game through twitter would make it easier to reach new people. If you post interesting facts and snippets about the game, it could catch people's attention much faster -- they don't have to read through pages of text. If they see something they like from twitter posts, then they could delve deeper. The point of Twitter (if we were to adopt it) is to generate only that initial spark of interest. If a user wants to know more, then they can simply visit the Kenshi site or the Facebook site.

Also, a lot of trying to promote the game or interest in the game through sites such as Reddit or Digg could work well. A lot of games with similar mechanics to Kenshi (Such as Mount and Blade) have an off-topic site. It's fully possible to try and promote Kenshi through those forums. Gaming forums would also be a good place to try and generate interest.

There is r/Kenshi in reddit already but it's pretty dead there. Though I'm trying to wake it up a little but I'm having problems since for some reason few of my recent posts can't be seen there.

If I can get it working I will have small competition there and give away few game codes paid by me and hope it will add some movement there too. Also it helps funding Kenshi slightly

Santaissick wrote:There is r/Kenshi in reddit already but it's pretty dead there. Though I'm trying to wake it up a little but I'm having problems since for some reason few of my recent posts can't be seen there.

If I can get it working I will have small competition there and give away few game codes paid by me and hope it will add some movement there too. Also it helps funding Kenshi slightly

If you need extra prizes, PM me, i have 2 copies of DOTA 2 that steam gave me for free, could be usefull.

And yes, I intended to put something about reddit in the op, stupid me.

lkenage wrote:
Also, a lot of trying to promote the game or interest in the game through sites such as Reddit or Digg could work well. A lot of games with similar mechanics to Kenshi (Such as Mount and Blade) have an off-topic site. It's fully possible to try and promote Kenshi through those forums. Gaming forums would also be a good place to try and generate interest.

Indeed, game forums would be the best way to start off if we tried to promote the game via forums.

John wrote: Let's look at the cold hard facts; 62% of the Human population uses some sort of social media site, that is 4,340,000,000, or 4 billion, 340 million.

Fuck me, but I love stats. Can you tell me how you got that number?

This site http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/ ... ial-media/


The total figure is four billion seven hundred two million, but I took a few hundred thousand away from that total to compensate for the fact that a lot of people will use more than one social media site.

Interesting. I would think you need to take more than a few hundred thousand away though to calculate the correct number.

I'd say a bit more than the facebook number would indicate the number of worldwide users. not that facebook does them all, but there are inactive accounts and doubled accounts and the vast majority of people on social media have AT LEAST a facebook account. Twitter users and all the rest have in the past probably used facebook (which even if inactive now are part of that 1 billion).

So I'd say real stats of actual social media users are most likely much closer to 2 billion than 4 billion. And possibly less than that. Still an impressive number though.

Blxz wrote:Interesting. I would think you need to take more than a few hundred thousand away though to calculate the correct number.

I'd say a bit more than the facebook number would indicate the number of worldwide users. not that facebook does them all, but there are inactive accounts and doubled accounts and the vast majority of people on social media have AT LEAST a facebook account. Twitter users and all the rest have in the past probably used facebook (which even if inactive now are part of that 1 billion).

So I'd say real stats of actual social media users are most likely much closer to 2 billion than 4 billion. And possibly less than that. Still an impressive number though.

Indeed, especialy considering that 100 years ago we had only just reached 1 billion people on this miserable plannet, and now double that number spend a large amount of their time on sites like this.

*Sighs* Ahh, progress.

Very impressive. Have you heard about the impending 'data crunch'? It goes by different names but in the US at least they are beginning to run out of frequencies to send data wirelessly. I find it so interesting. Obviously there are only so many frequencies out there; can't use visible light because it would be confused by actual sunlight as well as make it possible to see data in the air and blind us all. Can't use things like gamma rays and the high intensity/frequency rays since that would kill us. And can't use wavelengths that are too similar otherwise they cancel each other out. That is why you don't get radio stations right next to each other (for example on 100.MHz, 100.1MHz and 100.2MHz). They need a small gap for the data to be clear.

My point is, that at the current data growth from things like smartphones and the like, Amricans will be running out of useable wireless bandwidth in the AIR by about 2014. This is part of the explanation why it is virtually impossible to get things like unlimited data plans for mobile phones anymore as well as fairly stiff money costs for going over the limit.

A big source is still the old analog tv networks that have the space reserved but are not using it. Unfortunately many have bought lifetime reservations for it so they would have to sell it for the bandwidth to become usable.

Interesting for me.

Blxz wrote:Very impressive. Have you heard about the impending 'data crunch'? It goes by different names but in the US at least they are beginning to run out of frequencies to send data wirelessly. I find it so interesting. Obviously there are only so many frequencies out there; can't use visible light because it would be confused by actual sunlight as well as make it possible to see data in the air and blind us all. Can't use things like gamma rays and the high intensity/frequency rays since that would kill us. And can't use wavelengths that are too similar otherwise they cancel each other out. That is why you don't get radio stations right next to each other (for example on 100.MHz, 100.1MHz and 100.2MHz). They need a small gap for the data to be clear.

My point is, that at the current data growth from things like smartphones and the like, Amricans will be running out of useable wireless bandwidth in the AIR by about 2014. This is part of the explanation why it is virtually impossible to get things like unlimited data plans for mobile phones anymore as well as fairly stiff money costs for going over the limit.

A big source is still the old analog tv networks that have the space reserved but are not using it. Unfortunately many have bought lifetime reservations for it so they would have to sell it for the bandwidth to become usable.

Interesting for me.

I have not heard of this, quite interesting, if this "data crunch" does happen, I wonder what replacement we would use, if any.

Oh god. I'm scared now There are too much of these end of the world prophecies. Every month there is new thing to fear... And every one of those are between 2012 and 2014. Maybe apocalypse is really coming in few years We will end up living like people in Kenshi before the game is even ready

Making threads on the larger forums (Gamespot) etc whith many thousands of visitors is always a good idea. Don't limit yourself to small indie or RPG forums with maybe a few hundred visitors.

Blxz wrote:Very impressive. Have you heard about the impending 'data crunch'? It goes by different names but in the US at least they are beginning to run out of frequencies to send data wirelessly. I find it so interesting. Obviously there are only so many frequencies out there; can't use visible light because it would be confused by actual sunlight as well as make it possible to see data in the air and blind us all. Can't use things like gamma rays and the high intensity/frequency rays since that would kill us. And can't use wavelengths that are too similar otherwise they cancel each other out. That is why you don't get radio stations right next to each other (for example on 100.MHz, 100.1MHz and 100.2MHz). They need a small gap for the data to be clear.

My point is, that at the current data growth from things like smartphones and the like, Amricans will be running out of useable wireless bandwidth in the AIR by about 2014. This is part of the explanation why it is virtually impossible to get things like unlimited data plans for mobile phones anymore as well as fairly stiff money costs for going over the limit.

A big source is still the old analog tv networks that have the space reserved but are not using it. Unfortunately many have bought lifetime reservations for it so they would have to sell it for the bandwidth to become usable.

Interesting for me.

There's always encryption to help us out there. Let's say a radiostation uses 100.0Mhz and another uses the same 100.0Mhz. They both have an encryption with a different key. With the adequate software on your radio, you'll be able to get both signals seperated. The encryption is just used to seperate them both. There's probably other ways, but that's one at least.

vurt wrote:Making threads on the larger forums (Gamespot) etc whith many thousands of visitors is always a good idea. Don't limit yourself to small indie or RPG forums with maybe a few hundred visitors.

Indeed, those threads get a lot of traffic.

FYI - I don't use social networking sites at all. I think they are trendy, transient, and basically worthless in the big picture.

And yet... I found Kenshi anyway.

Steam was how - the Greenlight area reaches hundreds of thousands of users, and is in my opinion, Kenshi's biggest media asset at this time. That will dwindle as more games are added, and as the "newness" of Kenshi runs out over there.

Use your strongest assets first, is what I'd suggest. Those are Steam's Greenlight, and a Kickstarter project. Reach your most hardcore fans - the gamers - where they live. Then you can move on to sites like Desura and other small outlet sites to push for more awareness. After that has run it's course and the excitement has ground down, you can start hitting social sites.

Kanaro wrote:
Use your strongest assets first, is what I'd suggest. Those are Steam's Greenlight, and a Kickstarter project. Reach your most hardcore fans - the gamers - where they live. Then you can move on to sites like Desura and other small outlet sites to push for more awareness. After that has run it's course and the excitement has ground down, you can start hitting social sites.

I wasn't aware that Kenshi had a kickstarter project.

Thing about steam is that there is little we, the common masses, can do to thurther propote it other thn saying to people "Hey, this game has been greenlighted on steam, go check it out!" I am thinking more along the lines of things that we can do to enhance publicity.