reflections from the legendary developer from the 2007 Independent Game Conference where he was asked about the marketing for Tabula Rasa, the MMORPG he most recently worked on. While he feels the marketing was “fine”, he reserves criticism for himself and his studio. He believes that they hurt the game’s sales potential by inviting too many beta testers before the game was fun enough to play.

“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.”

He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.”

Tabula Rasa has been well received by critics. No sales data is available for the game as of yet.