Squad and there forum.

[Commander Jebidiah]

Just got to womder why Squad will no matter what always post news on twitter, facebook and reddit before they post it on there Official Forum.

[Robotengineer]

Lots of people have been wondering it for a long time, I think the excuse is that some news is better suited for certain channels of communication.

[basic.syntax]

I'm a bit disappointed that announcements we've all been waiting for seem to start in Twitter. You can't use the official forums as a sole source of KSP information. I think we will be compensated by the usual detailed release notes. (Ex: .90) Long-format postings come here, 140char stuff shows up over there.

Whether agree or not, the question was hashed over and answered in this thread.

[razark]

You can't use the official forums as a sole source of KSP information.

If we're lucky, the information gets reposted here, but not by an official representative of Squad.

Squad doesn't own reddit. Squad doesn't own twitter. Squad does own the forum. Ignoring the one channel they actually have full control over seems pretty damn stupid. If a new player is looking to find information about why their game suddenly stopped working the way they expected it to, would they be more likely to come to Squad's official web presence, or go to a third party source, such as twitter, reddit, or the Orbiter forum to find out what's going on?

(Maybe they should hire a marketing firm to run some things for them.)

[Kerbart]

While these are marketing blunders of the first order, it's important to keep in mind that Squad is a software company and has no background in marke.... ooooh, wait...

[Deddly]

Just curious as to whether any of you who are critisizing their marketing strategy have any experience of marketing yourselves? Personally I do not have experience in that field, but it seems that most companies these days make frequent use of social media and do not always include the same information on their own web site.

For the record, I dislike social media and use none of them, but I can see that they can be used very skillfully in marketing. Squad stands to benefit if they can get you to post on Facebook or Twitter instead of the forums. How? Because when you post something about KSP, all of your "friends" or "followers" are automatically linked in, which is free advertising. This, in my opinion, is why the Kerbal Countdown competition is not open to forum entries, and allowing some news to be released via social networks only encorages everyone to follow them and draw even more attention to what is said there.

Whether we like it or not, I can't fault their marketing

[sumghai]

The other thing to note is that the format of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr etc. all lend themselves to short, easy to digest, off-the-cuff comments and musings, which is why SQUAD would post there more frequently.

On the other hand, the KSP Forums is primarily perused by dedicated fans of the game, and any posts SQUAD makes here would need to be more substantial to satiate forum members' demands - since substantial posts take non-trivial amounts of time to compose, SQUAD wisely chose to lean more towards social media to maximise exposure in the shortest amount of time, and then summarize it in their weekly Squadcast / Devnotes.

[Norpo]

-snip-

This is what I always thought, writing "Yes, resources will work the way you described it" in reply to a Reddit post is a heckuvalot easier than writing a detailed report on how it's going to work, neatly format it, and slap it in a Devnote tuesday. (Is it tuesday? I dunno.)

[Greenfire32]

Just got to womder why Squad will no matter what always post news on twitter, facebook and reddit before they post it on there Official Forum.

The word you meant was, "instead."

Just curious as to whether any of you who are critisizing their marketing strategy have any experience of marketing yourselves?

While not directly, I am involved in advertising which is a related topic to marketing.

SQUAD wisely chose to lean more towards social media to maximise exposure in the shortest amount of time, and then summarize it in their weekly Squadcast / Devnotes.

*sigh*

The problem is not that SQUAD has a facebook, twitter, reddit, etc. The problem is that the info they post on those channels, doesn't exist here in an official capacity at all. Unless some random user makes a thread saying, "Maxmaps made a tweet, discus," it doesn't get posted here.

At. All.

That is the problem. They want a twitter? That's OK! But you can't release bits of info here and there (such as things like heatshields for example), without making a post here.

The common defensive argument is, "it would be counter-intuitive for Maxmaps to make a post on twitter and then come here to the forums and make a post here every time he wants to say something."

But there's a really easy solution to that. See the "Now streaming" tab on the forum page? How hard would it be to add a "recent tweets" tab or a "recent reddit posts" tab?!

That would solve all of the issues. For Kod's sake, I didn't even know there was a contest going on because SQUAD only said there was one exclusively on twitter! Same deal with the heatshields and fairings. Have you seen an official post here on these forums that say anything (ANYTHING AT ALL) about those things? I sure as hell can't find it. I found out about those things when some random user created a thread for them.

I don't work for SQUAD. Why should I have to scour the internet looking for bits and pieces of info, gather them all up in one place (the official place) and then say, "for your convenience, look what I've done!"

It's a giant pile of Malarkey and we all know it.

SQUAD, I love KSP. But if you continue to treat your customers who have already bought the game like yesterday's news, you're going to lose your steam. And you'll lose it fast.

[razark]

Releasing short little tidbits on social media? Ok, I suppose you could say there's an excuse for that. I don't think it would be out of order to also post that kind of thing in the forum.

However, there are other incidents that don't make sense. The request for feedback or ideas on tutorials was made on reddit. Why not also make that request on the forum? That's the sort of thing that is likely to generate longer posts.

The other major incident that I've seen recently was the removal of the 64-bit Windows version from Steam.

Squad posted absolutely no warning on the forum beforehand. Squad posted no explanation afterwards. People were posting a high number of questions regarding it. I saw multiple threads asking why, what, etc. All of this was met by complete silence from Squad. Later, someone posted a link to Harvester's comment on the Orbiter forum that explained the version had been intentionally removed.

If you were a new player, and were not aware of the way Squad posts information everywhere, where would you look to find out why your game wasn't working? I would expect that players would first come to Squad's official website to find out information about Squad's own game. It would never have occurred to me to start looking around on a website owned by someone other than the company responsible for the game, much less a forum for a completely different website. We aren't talking about a minor annoyance here. We're not talking about a release update that removed it. We're talking about players being completely sideswiped with the inability to run their game being met with what appears to be complete indifference from the company they bought it from.

That's some serious Grade A male bovine fecal matter.

Simply put, yes Squad's spray-and-pray marketing on social media might get potential customers' attention. But Squad also has a duty to their existing customers.

Edited April 20, 2015 by razark

[sumghai]

However, there are other incidents that don't make sense. The request for feedback or ideas on tutorials was made on reddit. Why not also make that request on the forum? That's the sort of thing that is likely to generate longer posts.

Perhaps SQUAD wanted quick summaries of ideas from the wider user community or casual fans, not just detailed tomes from those who frequent the forums.

The other major incident that I've seen recently was the removal of the 64-bit Windows version from Steam.

Squad posted absolutely no warning on the forum beforehand. Squad posted no explanation afterwards. People were posting a high number of questions regarding it. I saw multiple threads asking why, what, etc. All of this was met by complete silence from Squad. Later, someone posted a link to Harvester's comment on the Orbiter forum that explained the version had been intentionally removed.

There was plenty of warning posted in significant detail on the forums regarding the removal of 64-bit: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/328-The-future-of-Windows-64-bit-builds-for-KSP

While it doesn't mention Steam specifically, it's fairly easy to read between the lines at the time and conclude that 64-bit binaries would no longer be available from Steam.

[razark]

There was plenty of warning posted in significant detail on the forums regarding the removal of 64-bit: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/328-The-future-of-Windows-64-bit-builds-for-KSP

While it doesn't mention Steam specifically, it's fairly easy to read between the lines at the time and conclude that 64-bit binaries would no longer be available from Steam.

Yes, that does exist.

The fact is that Squad did not address their users that were attempting to find out what was going on. (Well, they did. On another forum.) Aside from that, how long ago was that posted? How many new players have joined the community since then and had not seen it or didn't know to look for it? The fact that there were so many people asking about it shows how effective that communication was.

Furthermore, reading through it points to the fact that Squad intended to no longer publish 64-bit versions in the near future. There is nothing in it that points to Squad, without notice, removing the version from people that already had it installed and were actively using it.

[Greenfire32]

Furthermore, reading through it points to the fact that Squad intended to no longer publish 64-bit versions in the near future. There is nothing in it that points to Squad, without notice, removing the version from people that already had it installed and were actively using it.

That's what I took away from that as well. The fact that SQUAD wouldn't support a 64bit release in the future and that there wouldn't be a 64bit download for 1.0

They didn't say they were removing the already existing version.

[razark]

Edit:

The post by Vanamonde I was referring to has been deleted.

Edited April 22, 2015 by razark