YankeeBravo

No worries on that front. Even if it had been a snide jab, I'd take no offense. Develop an extremely thick skin working in print journalism, so.... I will say the title worked. After all, it's an interesting thought and it is somewhat of an aberration given how active things were during the Kickstarter itself and more so when you compare it to the community that other projects have built up. As I recall, I think the SVReward site has had the "community" link coming back the forums here since I first saw the place in July, so it's not completely that people don't know about it. I do think that whoever's handling the community aspect for the Two Guys may not have thought things all the way through. From what I've seen, a significant problem is that everything's so fragmented. You have the SVRewards site, you've got the GfA site, you've got SQ.net (which I know has been around much longer) and you've got the "microsites" like the Andromedan Post (which I just learned about today, actually). So just there you've got potentially four different sites/places where news or other information might pop up with no (immediate) mention on the others. So, yeah. Obviously having an active community is more difficult in that type of situation versus something like DoubleFine where they had an established forum were everyone already knew they could go for discussions/information. Who knows? Maybe it'd have been better to have incorporated the SVRewards site with SQ.net and used forum integration for commenting rather than WordPress. Or maybe that was explored and just wasn't technically or logistically feasible. Bottom line: the lack of a centralized "hub" hurts, in my opinion. But an issue that's just as big, as was touched on earlier and before I showed up, is that there simply isn't a lot to discuss. Hell, the anecdote about Chris' flea problem got 17 responses with a lot of them actually cat related, so...That suggests to me that people are willing to discuss, but it's just not going to happen until there's a steadier flow of things that CAN be discussed. Which ties in to my last point. It's taken papers a while to learn this and it's one of those things that everyone already knows as a matter of common sense, but....We spend a LOT of money commissioning research on how to drive traffic to our publication's webite (for ad impressions, as well as traffic numbers). The big factor to not just getting massive page views but building recurring traffic/community is to have fresh and exclusive content that can't be obtained anywhere else. Obviously, the Two Guys have a lock on the "exclusive content" portion. What needs work is the "fresh" angle. When you know you're only getting something new maybe once or twice a month, you're not going to be hitting the site every day or even once a week. Not saying they need to have updates every day, but if they're serious about building a community, they need much more frequent content updates with material the fosters discussion. Once a fledgling community's there and has things to discuss and debate on their own (as with Wasteland 2) you can ease off on the frequency of updates somewhat. Again, just a few thoughts from my perspective.

Actually, a few points that I see here. I'm one of those 10,000 or so who've largely been "lurking", at SVRewards, the project page, here and at the GfA site. The earlier posts are pretty much dead on. SpaceVenture has more or less gone "dark", so there's really not a lot to talk about. Look at the SVRewards site...I was extremely excited to get the e-mail back in July about the thing opening up, and looking forward to the project diaries and all the rest, but really...There's just not much to discuss. I know that there's a lot of planning and plotting and other preproduction discussions going on, but still, a couple posts a month isn't going to drive a lot of discussion or community involvement, particularly when half of them are 'What's Chris doing on the marketing front' type posts. I'm hoping the Two Guys have changed their minds on timeframes since the HTML5 thing blew up and the Feb 2013 date's out the window. Not just because it gives them more time to deliver a quality product, but because I'm sitting here thinking 'What happened to those Kickstarter incentives?' Don't get me wrong, I'm not in it for the incentives, I was putting in money to see a new SQ-style game from Scott and Mark regardless. However, they did come up with some pretty cool incentives for the campaign, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit to twinges of "buyer's remorse" at kicking in at the level I did with none of this "concept art voting" or "discussions with Scott and Mark" anywhere in sight. Hopefully that's still in the works at some point down the road. For the time being, I'd definitely like to see more regular updates. As things stand, SVRewards and the other site are one of those 'Haven't checked in a while, let's see if anything's new' rather than somewhere I go regularly as I do with DFA or Wasteland 2 or Tex Murphy. Just my couple cents on the 'Why is it so dead' discussion, for whatever it's worth.