Tabula Rasa - Interview @ Gamasutra

Richard Garriott has some interesting things to say about the launch of Tabula Rasa in an interview with Gamasutra.

“We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun," he said, adding, "As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.”

He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.”

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This guy can never say a straight sentence.

I wonder what the game played like back then … because it is pretty dry now.

I was in the beta - couldn't really get into the game. They started adding pollish near the end of the beta but tbh I have no interests in playing an MMO for a while.

His point is a pretty good one, I think. But that assumes Tabula Rasa really is what it's supposed to be and that the Beta testers really didn't get a chance to see that.

Word of mouth can kill you, but it won't help you very much. If his game's for real, then they should market the heck out of it.