I'd love for more players in the game.
I've seen a lot of complaining recently about the lack of good servers, or the lack of people joining servers.
With an increase of players there is only going to be an increase in creativity and the number of good servers around and the number of people available to play on them.
I do find that the game doesn't have a very big spread in advertising.
Most people I know of have either heard of it via word of mouth, from their friends, or some few saw a GoogleAdvert or whatnot, and then atleast a sizable chunk saw it on "The Screen Savers", I think it was, or some tech/computing related TV show.
And maybe it's just my friends, but in a number of places (among different friends), when I've tried to explain the game and reccommend it, I've been brushed off a number of times.
Either I'm not very good at explaining it (Essentially saying "It's like playing with digital Lego"), or people aren't interested.
But, that said, most of these people will also say it sounds like Minecraft (especially if I mention the word Blocks).
The moment they even hear the word Block, they straight away jump to Minecraft, even if none of the words I have said before even have any relation to Minecraft.
And of course, the moment someone connects it to Minecraft, they like to brush it off as nothing but a second-rate copy-cat game.
There are 4 people I know in real life who play Blockland.
My good school-friend Liquid, who first reccommended and showed me it. (I have no idea where he learnt of it, although he's probably said before).
Two friends of mine who Liquid and I know from school, Bongo and something else (honestly can't remember, long time since he's played or I saw him on it). They only purchased Blockland because myself and Liquid talked about it a lot.
And then a friend of mine and Liquid, Elycopterr, who Liquid met through YouTube.
So, that's 3 out of probably 30-40 or so people I've personally reccommended it to. So, I honestly don't know if the game doesn't sound appealing, or I do it a bad job in advertising it, or if there's something else.
well if blockland had like.... a free 30 day thing or something. like full access then the key gets locked till they buy the game.
it would be popular as forget. kids like free stuff. and they would beg parents to buy it later. but never likely to beg for money up front when they havnt really played it.
dumb kids cant grasp what demo versions of games are. they only know the limits that are in their face.
though i dunno how you would deal with temporary keys and people making new 30-day accounts every month.
This is actually a really brilliant idea, but you raised the obvious problems, in that you don't get much control over how to stop people from exploiting the free period.
The only other similar option is to have a free version that seems free, but is also severely limited. But then how am I not just describing the Demo Mode?
I don't know how much of an increase in sales we recieved over that weekend that Badspot put the game on sale, but if that was successful, then I suppose semi-regular sales, mixed with good advertising, would be an alright way to spur some increase in purchases.
