If you're serious when you hit that yes button, add my MSN - [email protected] (made that 6+ years ago, no hatin, lol.) It doesn't matter if you have money or not, you have a voice!...for talking other people out of THEIR money!

Advertising to developers (on behalf of BYOND) is a little different to advertising your game. The difference however is mostly the approach, and who you send the emails to. It's not something that needs a huge amount of cash (although a central community fund in general IS useful, in a more vague sense), it just really needs some people wise to how you put BYOND across to developers.

Which means experience of other platforms, some professional experience also for example, so they can relate things in terms that a wider market of developers is interested in.

I'm just hoping that home page with the dinosaur is gone >.> It is, right? Because at first glance byond scared off the friends I got to try it because it looked like a "kids site"

http://web.archive.org/web/20070721171114/http:// www.byond.com/
He is referring to the silly splash screen here, I can see why that would turn people off.

Advertise on reddit.com/r/gamedev. Everybody on there are hobby game makers using Unity/HTML5/Gamemaker etc.

Kaiochao wrote:

The lifespan of BYOND games isn't very long, either. They're like insects that live and die so quickly they evolve in front of our eyes to gain immunities to pesticides (no offense), so what we find popular now is probably among the best we've ever had. Compare to the past and see how much further we can expand.

This isn't actually true, and it may be part of the problem. The games that are popular here have been around for years. Some were designed pre-4.0 and still have the default DS interface. What this shows you is that it's really the socialization and gameplay that is what matters to people, at least for these sorts of games. You can make an Anime rip with crappy graphics and UI, but as long as it features some social aspect that Anime fans want, they'll play it.

While it's true that BYOND is outdated in many ways, that doesn't mean that the tool has no value or can't be used to produce successful games. I mean, we have some successful games here, games that have an audience of hundreds of players (some have 1000s that have come and gone), and even games that make a non-trivial amount of money. No one is really making a living off BYOND and none of the games are mainstream-successful, but I imagine that the creators of games that have a fanatic audience have to feel somewhat satisfied with what they've done. I would consider that a success.

I think new developers should be more interested in spending their time wisely by learning something more likely to be used for innovation, where their skills could be more readily put to use in the future.

It depends what developers want to get out of this. The truth is that most developers will fail at making a game that gets people to play it, whether they use BYOND or not. I like to think BYOND makes the process a little easier, at least for certain types of games. If I wanted to make a modern game with very responsive UI and nice graphics, I wouldn't use BYOND. But these are not the only types of games out there, and that's all I've been trying to stress with the "next big hit" talk. A do believe that a game like NEStalgia or Eternia or ROTP could be successful because there are a lot of people who really don't care that much about modern games.

On the subject of advertising, I do certainly think BYOND could get more users because, for whatever reason, people seem to stick around here... and most people have never heard of BYOND. So it stands to reason that if more people had heard of BYOND, some percentage of them would stick around. We are in a dead period for many reasons, including no real advertisement, a lot of competing demands for Internet users, and some stagnancy in the development here due to a variety of things (lack of money, lack of time, and a general bloat that comes with a very old piece of software). We're trying to improve the latter at least.

I have no problem with people wanting to leave BYOND for greener pastures (many end up coming back); I just wish people would stop talking about it because it generally doesn't accomplish anything to say, on the forum for BYOND, that BYOND isn't as good as other things. In some venues, one might even find that to be insulting, however true.

I agree with Tom and Empirez. There are a lot of things that BYOND does well, and while we do have a few difficult people who decide they want to create call of duty on BYOND and continuously ask for 3D capabilities, client side processing, high player count with minimal lag etc, but those people are morons. There is an enormous market for fun concept games, they do not need to be elaborate, sport state of the art graphics etc, look at minecraft or terraria. Those two games have hit it BIG but are simple sandbox games. BYOND can spit out simple 2d sandbox games with ease. I feel for Tom, the discussion is always about the limitations or issues with BYOND but why would he or Lummox go off and quit their day jobs and invest all of their time to BYOND and hire new staff etc when they have been doing ALL of the heavy lifting in the development department for the last several years. Do you know how few games out there actually make use of the new pixel movement features? Its embarrassing. I think the issues we should be talking about arent on BYONDs end, but on reviving the developer community on BYOND so Tom and Lummox have a bloody reason to implement new features.