Tabula Rasa Interview
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Now as far as the future of Tabula Rasa, we've noticed that you've had many new promotions such as the 7-day trial keys given away here at PAX and on the website, plus the recent beta reactivation promotion. So it seems like there's a large push to get both old players and new players back into the game.
Yeah, and we'd really like to get both. A lot of the people we're seeing here at PAX are still a bit surprised. They're like, "Oh is this out?" But yeah it actually has been out, but it's been lost in the noise from some other really big launches over the past year. It's been a really big year for games.
As far as the beta re-activations, we managed to burn through a lot of people in our beta when the beta was not as solid as perhaps it should have been. A mistake we obviously learned from. And it's really a tricky thing with betas, really, because you are testing the game and it is a beta, but modern gamers think of a beta as it's launching tomorrow and it basically should be perfect, assuming that's what the game is going to be. Now the nice thing about it was because we're really focusing on stability and optimization during that beta, we had quite possibly the smoothest MMO launch in history. We had very, very few problems. The first couple weeks, the first month, we didn't have server downtime, we didn't have giant wait queues of people trying to get in, I mean it was remarkably smooth. So it paid off for us there, but the downside was some of the beta players ended up being casualties of us trying to get to that smooth place, and took the impressions of the game from that. So we spent a year adding content, optimizing and just polishing the game up some more and adding some things. So we're trying to get them interested again. You know, "Hey, you checked us out, it was rough at the time, because that's what we were focusing on, and we got that sorted out. But come back in and see what the game is really like when it's running the way it's supposed to.
