The open source gaming community, however, is comparably tiny. If you look at gamers in general, I'd say the open source gaming community that knows about Minetest is 2% of them at best. Maybe only even 1% or less because I guess the majority of FLOSS users either still resorts to non-free, closed-source games or doesn't game at all.rubenwardy wrote:Minetest needs better marketing (ahem, Minetest doesn't inspire confidence) but not necessarily advertising. We are already notable in the open source gaming community, with some extra polish in-game and value proposition online then it will be easier to draw in players
Almost all other gamers believe think they know that Minecraft is the only game of its kind. Maybe there's another percent or two who may have heard or read about Minetest, but they're fully convinced that Minetest is a Minecraft clone made in order to cash in on Minecraft's success. They neither know nor care about Minecraft and Minetest's common ancestor named Infiniminer, also because they flat-out refuse to accept that their treasured golden calf Minecraft isn't a fully original concept designed from scratch from the ground up but instead a "ripoff" of another game.
But most don't know anything about non-commercial games beyond Steam, GOG, the Windows Store and what's on brick-and-mortar store shelves. So they don't know that Minetest exists in the first place.
Apart from making Minetest known, the next obstacle will be to convince people that Minetest is worth playing, especially those who already know Minecraft. Those who are cheap are the easiest to get: Tell them Minetest costs nothing unlike Minecraft, and they're sold. Everyone else, however, will always compare everything to Minecraft — and consider Minecraft the reference, the pinnacle, the definition of 100%. "Better" equals "more like Minecraft" to them. Minetest would be perfect if it were absolutely identical to Minecraft but for free. If something is different from Minecraft, it sucks because it isn't like Minecraft.
Exactly this will be the trickiest part: showing and convincing people that something about a voxel game can be better than Minecraft. I'm not talking about the license, the masses of Windows-only users don't care about licenses. The programming language is slightly better, a very few may understand that a game written in C++ needs fewer resources and therefore performs better than one written in Java. Everyone else doesn't care, also because they won't notice a difference with their dozen 4Ghz cores and top-of-the-line gaming graphics card.
Minetest's biggest advantage is modding. Installing mods is way easier than in Minecraft, Minetest was meant to be modded from the very beginning, you can have different worlds with different sets of mods, and you can play almost whichever online server you want without first hacking mods into or out of your client because Minetest gets the mods for an online game from the server.
At the same time, modding becomes a disadvantage because in order to keep up with Minecraft, Minetest must be modded. This is inconvenient for both newbies and hardcore gamers. While the newbies find everything that goes beyond installing a game and playing it as it came out of the box too complicated, the hardcore gamers still need to know what mods there are, what mods are good for what, what mods you need to achieve what and so forth. Especially seasoned Minecraft players will have a hard time translating from Minecraft to Minetest because things are named differently in Minetest than in Minecraft (e.g. in order to get something like redstone, you need to install Mesecons because redstone is named MESE in Minetest).
Guess why Mineclone2 is so vastly popular: It's the closest that you can hope for Minetest to be like Minecraft.
Now I'm not an advocate for throwing minetest_game away in favour of Mineclone2. minetest_game is still necessary as the base that one can mod like there's no tomorrow. In this context it's actually good that it only comes with those bare necessities that hardly anyone would want to mod out.
But I've read several times already that Minetest should come with a more fleshed-out game. And I believe that if Minetest should become popular with people who can't e.g. install and configure Debian to whatever they need it for without a manual, it needs to be "awesome out of the box". Most people don't want a modding base, they want a black box game that's cool as it comes. Such a game should be one that really shows off what Minetest can do that Minecraft can't. And it should be good enough to work as the default game, for most gamers will probably install Minetest, fire it up and start playing right away without configuring anything and without reading up on anything. Whatever they start playing then needs to blow them away.
Ideally, Minetest should come with four games:
- A fleshed-out, fully equipped, non-Minecraft-clone game with stuff that vanilla Minecraft doesn't have as the default that newbies start playing with right away. (Granted, Lord of the Test would be overkill, not to mention make people believe that Minetest is Minecraft meets Tolkien. Now, if Dreambuilder were a game instead of a modpack...)
- minetest_game for the modders.
- minimal for the ultra-hardcore modders.
- Mineclone2 as the (non-default!) game for the "whatever isn't like Minecraft sucks" crowd.
As Wuzzy already mentioned, outward appearance is very important in marketing, too. This means we need screenshots. And half a dozen screenshots from a vanilla minetest_game world from five years ago that has been run for, like, five minutes won't cut it. Okay, there should be vanilla minetest_game screenshots, especially if minetest_game stays the game in Minetest. But keep them up-to-date and show off new features in them.
And there should definitely be lots and lots of screenshots that show off Minetest as it looks like when it's modded to kingdom come and back. If you want to sell modding, you must impress people with what can be done with mods, especially those that do the really spectacular things, ideally things that you can't get Minecraft to do even if you mod it.
If you want to whet people's appetite even further, if they're done with the screenshots, show them videos of modded Minetest worlds. You won't be able to impress anyone with vanilla minetest_game. But you will impress them with Lua-controlled Advanced Trains networks like those on the LinuxWorks server, just to give one example.
This seems to be a general problem with software that isn't developed by big companies. You need to take care of the backend, the user frontend, documentation and marketing. Big companies have dedicated departments for these.Wuzzy wrote:The UI looks horrible, especially the main menu is user-hostile and ugly and needs a major overhaul. An improvement of the UI also will mean there will be prettier screenshots to show off ^^
Outside of big companies, take a group of n developers who take care of a software product. Usually you have one developer who is forced against his/her will to design a user frontend although he/she would rather work on the backend and n–1 developers who work on the backend. As for documentation, if a manpage is absolutely critically necessary (e.g. because all major GNU/Linux distros will refuse to include it into their repos without a manpage), someone will write one, but everything that goes beyond is left to the users. And as for marketing, the developers simply sit and wait until people discover their product by themselves because nobody takes care of that.
Now if you really want an application, especially a game, to become popular, you need an UI that not only makes the game useable by being there but that's logical and pleasant to use even for non-coders.
Last but not least, let's get to the name issue. And let's be honest: "Minetest" isn't the luckiest choice. It looks so much like an experimental FLOSS Minecraft rip-off that it's next to impossible to convince people otherwise. (Granted, when celeron55 started working on Minetest, he couldn't possibly foresee how huge a success Minecraft would become.) And "test" implies that it's an experiment never meant for public deployment. This is where games like Voxelands (RIP) and Terasology shine: Their names don't imply a half-baked Minecraft clone.