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Posted by madhaha at Friday 22 June 2007, 01:37 |
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Today marks what is almost certainly the last day of the FilePlanet Subscribers only beta. Just a little recap:
Splash Damage is making availible 60,000 keys open to the public for the beta test. Unfortunately they have struck some faustian bargin with FilePlanet which means 30,000 keys are reserved for FilePlanet subscribers and 30,000 will be given to people with free FilePlanet accounts. No FilePlanet account? NO BETA FOR YOU!
Actually there is another way: you can get one of the VIP keys which have been given to various fan sites and reserved by the devs for competitions. GWL is running its own competitions obviously (check the forum and IRC ;). There are also competitions running in #etqwbeta on quakenet and various sites posted at the community forums.
Getting back on topic, two days have passed and on both days FilePlanet have favoured their subscribers with 10,000 beta keys. The smart money is on them dragging it on a third day making Saturday the first day the public beta is actually PUBLIC. This means the VIP keys are like gold dust and everyone is signing up for forums and league sites purely for the keys including yours truly.
But how will this affect the community as a whole in the aftermath? More in the next blog post. |
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Comments
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Nice ideas but who is getting the profit in the end? The amount of madness this game surrounds is new to me. So imo SD or ID is doing a great job with the promotion. If you haven't heard from QW yet your either blind or you live in a cave.
On another note what happens to ppl that allready were customers of fileplanet? Do they also get keys. I would feel cheated if I was a customer and would not get one. |
"Who is getting the profit in the end?" Well the only money that's being made is from FilePlanet subscriptions. How that's split is a matter between Splash Damage and FilePlanet.
On the first day, even FilePlanet subscribers weren't guaranteed a key. Only people that renewed their subscription, new Annual and Founder members got a key. On the second day, all paying subscribers got a key but no announcement was made on the first day regarding this obviously.
Money isn't the only thing you need to look at here. You need to look at the whole Global Volunteer Force thing. They're essentially going to get a lot of good press from important people in the community by giving them perks which cost them a minimal amount of money and time. All it amounts to is a few extra press releases, beta keys and a few extra bits of artwork for cookiecutter websites and suddenly they have a lot of grass roots control. You might call this astroturfing, bribing, selling out or manipulating the media. You might call it a way of giving something back to the community by encouraging gamers to spread out to these little mini-communities like QWL. Well it has obviously worked since I'm writing here and signed up on some german forum I can't even read. But on a deeper level, how would this much control affect future modding teams? Will they be assimilated at some point? Will it be more like the Make Something Unreal competition? |
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A GAME BY : |
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bord (Spammer)
