Tabula Rasa: Too Many Testers
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"Marketing is a black art,) Garriott replied. "We regularly go back and forth between it being all important, and irrelevant. At some basic level, I do believe that all great games will sell eventually, through word of mouth.)
He continued, (Marketing can definitely get you on the shelf, and in the first few weeks, get you off the shelf. In the long run, even with the best marketing, if it's a bad game, word gets out, and your sales will come to halt.)
Specifically, (I think the formal marketing did fine,) he replied. "They let people know the game existed, and was coming out. I actually think the biggest mistake was made not by the marketing department, but by the development team. We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken.)
(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.)
