Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5510106" data-attributes="member: 54877">Which brings us back to senior management incompetence as responsible, because anyone that has ever worked on a new software project of this nature could have told them that the above plan was doomed to failure before it started.  Maybe not for an experienced shop that knew exactly what it wanted to do and how, but the way DDI was set up from the get go?  No way! There were basically two good ways to do DDI, given the circumstances, and either one could work very well: 1. Go very slow and incremental.  Be very open--even open source pieces.  Have a handful of really sharp developers/designers that know what they are doing to incorporate the open source stuff worth taking.  Make an open alpha and open beta--continuously as new stuff is introduced.  As a version gets good enough, start charging minimally for the latest stable version.  The plan here is to keep year to year operating costs as low as reasonable for what it is, but make gradual progress that people can see.  PR is low key, but persistent. 2. Big Bang.  Put a ton of money into it.  Make the best piece of online support for table top play ever envisioned, and then some.  It is closed for awhile, with little or no hints of what is going on.  Once the feature set starts to firm up, PR starts being a little more open.  Then a closed alpha is followed rapidly by a closed but wider Beta.  NDA's abound.  What is released is so good that some people who don't even play 4E buy the subscription just to play around with the characters on the VT, solo.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/angel.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":angel:" title="Angel    :angel:" data-shortname=":angel:" />  People subscribe almost by reflex.  PR, once let loose, is huge.   Either do it or don't do it.  If you decide to do it, those are the two ways most likely to succeed.  Pick the one that fits your business model the best.  If you want to hedge with slow, inexpensive development and entice paying customers into a Beta, with the idea that you'll keep them there with incremental features--then you didn't really plan to "do it."</blockquote>

Verification