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Seriously. Is there even a marketing department or a real product manager who isn't a programmer or answers the phones part time? It's Conitec's mistake.




Everyone is in agreement here about Conitec's marketing. There was even a long thread about it a while back. I too was in your shoes and begged Conitec to get some marketing so I could say their product name with pride!!!! And then you know what happened?

I started making games.
I started going to game conferences.
I started talking to developers and investors and publishers.

And about 50% didn't know 3DGS and the other 50% predictably called it hobbyware. The ones who didn't know where mildly curious about it's feature set and then moved onto the game. The ones who did know, after a few minutes talking about it, they did NOT have that opinion and agreed that their opinion was second hand and not borne of using the product.

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Do you think a new name to go along with all the new features of the next version of the new engine would spark new sales?



No. Again, you can call it whatever you want but it's still the same engine under the hood and people buying a game engine look under the hood and not at the hood ornaments.

In all cases, what makes the biggest impression is the longevity of the company. How many game engines have been around, constantly improving (even if not at a rate we may be happy with), and under the same company for over a decade? How many can you think off the top of your head or even scouring gamedev.net? Not many, if any.

What you are asking Conitec to do is essentially throw that away. They have built up trademark and IP recognition in the industry under the 3DGS label. Whether the products rep is good or bad, it is ALWAYS bad business to through away IP equity for any reason. So while the product has been 3DGS for longer than some of it's users have been alive, you would ask them to take a GAMBLE (because no matter how cool the name sounds, it's all gamble) that dropping that name would generate strong and tangible benefits. As I've stated before, I jus don't see any benefit to a name change.

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Because being affilitated with and using the technology of "the world's worst game" isn't really a liability



First off, I find this a ridicoulous point to base your opinion of the engine or it's name on. 99% of our games in this community, IF they were finished and IF they were put up for display would earn that label. Unfortunatley, so would 99% of the games made by Torque, 3DBlitz, and even Unreal! Have you learned nothing from our Showcase Forums? Don't you know that it's easier to say "you suck" a thousand times than to take the time to actually pay attention to a game and say "this is ok" even once? That forums are populated by haters and not lovers and they will try to find fault with a game no matter what? And yet you STILL put weight into some anonymous stranger saying that?

Seriously Jetpack, if you are paying attention to the name of the engine and to what strangers say about a game even the author admits didn't push the engine one iota, then you are paying attention to the wrong things about game dev my friend.

So actually my ad would read:
""3D GAMESTUDIO - If you don't like the sound of it, it's because you're focusing on the wrong thing!"

I've been where you are Jetpack trust me. It's hard to believe in an engine when there is nothing to show for it. I know. But in the 5 years that I've used 3DGS, I've been able to raise 250k USD to fund my business (and my business is my educational game) through personal, federal, and state grants. And lest you think that this is because these are industries that don't know game engines (which is true), when I go to the Serious Games Conference or to he GDC and mention my game engine, I get the reaction I talked about above and then we move on. Here is the important part I want to impart on you: Not ONE person at ANY game conference I have EVER attended has EVER dissuaded me from using this engine. That means that other game developers, developers who have been in the industry longer and made more games than all of us combined... all knew the reputation the 3DGS had and yet looked past the reputation at what it could do. While this should NOT be taken as an endorsement of the engine by any of these people, it SHOULD be taken as reassurance that some of the biggest names in game development and publishing that I've met care very little about the engine (or it's name) and more about what I'M doing with it.


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