Well - i go more with the "polish the product first" theory. Too many people will take a look, leave and never come back IMHO at the current state.
Is it already possible to gain in game points? If not you should wait at least until this is implemented before going big with marketing.
Agreed. From an investment stand point it's better to have and keep players, then it is to make some noise, for the sake of making noise.
I don't think you understand. It's an early release and even with a finished product "polishing" will be needed in form of patches, updates etc. should we wait until every single fix has been implemented until marketing starts? how do you even define the term "marketing"? It's an ongoing progress which at the moment is toned down. It's not "making noise for the sake of making noise". Advertisement and other efforts are very much needed now for the sake of the whole game experience because players are waiting 30-45 minutes to play a single game! And that (player numbers) my friend is not a thing which can be fixed solely by "polishing"
Have a look at this for orientation:
http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=beyond+the+voidUpdate: I waited 21 minutes this session.
I don't play games (Last time was Mario). If the lack of players is part of the perceived problem, then there should be more advertising/marketing. If it's because people are playing and not enjoying it, then the game should be fixed first. Of course you don't wait till it's absolutely perfect. But if you jump the gun and get a lot of people interested and then let them down, they will not be back. Doesn't matter how good you make it. I know your not going to please everybody, but I would leave it up to the designers to make that call, they have a lot more experience then I do.
Plus hopefully they are being mentored by Ubisoft, and have very good behind the scenes guidance.
See, this discussion is really interesting, because that is exactly the kind of questions we ask ourselves all the time. Should we do more marketing ? Yes. But at which cost ?
We can't wait until the game is fully "polished" before making noise, in that we all agree. Otherwise, we'll have a great product with nobody knowing about it !
But on the other hand, the retention at the moment is really not good enough, and we think that even if this is an ongoing issue for all games, we can make it a lot better in little time. So why not wait a little bit longer and make our budget worth its spending ?
About the ETH question: yes the eth price went to the moon since we did our ICO. We had to spend a lot of them before the price went up though, so we don't have as much as if we spent nothing in December, January, February, March.... But still we have a nice decent budget to make this adventure happen.
We need to prepare in case the market goes down though, we can't be careless and spend dozen thousands $ in marketing, especially since we have the NXC from the ICO dedicated to promotion and bounties.
So what we decided for now is that we wait until devs implement at least game points and ranked games, and in the meanwhile we do small tutos in the new lobby page that is upcoming.
While we do that, Camille, who is working full time for B2Expand and has a degree in marketing, and myself (Manon, cofounder), will plan a marketing strategy for December, January, February. We will ask Ubisoft to help us on that matter too, I'm sure they have great advices for us.
By the way, I also requested the help of a data analyst from their team to help us understand and implement the right things at the right moment.
It is going forward guys, I know sometimes the project seems still from the outside, but from the inside everyone is running and working as hard as they can.
EDIT: I just tweeted a little survey about marketing budget
https://twitter.com/BeyondVoidGame/status/930773832352370688