Do a little research, and you will find that this has been studied many times by the gaming industry, and the findings have allways been the same, for any given game, only around 10% of its players will ever set foot on forums.
That means the vast, vast majority of gamers do not frequent forums.
Links please. Or google keywords please.
All I can find is studies regarding racism, violence, etc. in current games.
I'm sure the admins here can probably give us a short total of this forum's total unique hits/visits in a month, which would be a relative indicator of how many people hit the site. Most gamers checking stuff out won't become members.
Forums and WoM combined are going to be a large percentage of the exposure that people get to new titles, otherwise services such as XBL and PSN and the related websites and forums et al would not be as popular as they are.
I think that a lot of the people attempting to bring up various arguments here need to stop and think about what they say before they post, as they are not thinking things through and are simply posting conjecture.
Some of the argument against UT3 sales is that it was released by Epic in an "unfinished" or buggy state... well, without going onto forums the gamers wouldn't know this would they? So by this reasoning it's sales should have been as good as CoD/Cry/etc. then because 99% of the gamers never go to forums, so anyone going into the stores to buy a game is going to think the UT3 game is in the same state as the others on the shelf... The TV ads, Walmart, etc. are not going to be putting up posters stating that some forums are saying UT3 is unfinished...
Invalid because you are comparing a game with 5 years of maturity (2003-2008) that was built onto a more mature engine (UE2/2.5), to one that is just out for 6 months on a new engine (UE3).
Fanboyism and UI aside, I'd like to know what can be done to get the player counts over 400. I mean, thats just pathetic, I can't even find a freaking game.
I don't care if I'm beating a dead horse, I'm pissed UT is dead and want something done about it.
As a realist, I think that only a good patch3, some MSUC content and some time will improve the online state a bit. Right now there is a percentage of people put off by the forums/bugs/issues, a percentage waiting for the [hopefully] few fixes to the game and UI, and those waiting for more content.
Part of the issue with community content is that a lot of the better UT2004 mappers went on to work at studios, so no flaming meant to the community but 95% of the maps released are really sub-quality (for UT3). Personally I would only consider running about 5 or 6 of the community maps on my LAN. MSUC and the mappack groups (CBP etc.) should help this some.
I don't think UT3 will ever have the large online success that its predecessors had simply because the market is now more console-oriented and more divided onto other games. A lot of people are just playing other games now.
What will keep UT3 going to a large degree is the clans and mods that are released and those people who go in that direction onto those servers.
Regardless of how large the server player counts are, UT3 will survive just fine because it is one of the most mod'able and supported systems available.
It's just illogical. I've never, ever set foot on a game's forum before purchase and I'm what you might call a "hardcore" gamer. Why should anyone else's opinion dictate what I do?
What I do is I let the demo of a potential purchase tell me what I should buy. Or the full ver... ahem! Yeah, just the demo. If the demo sucks, I don't buy. Simple as that. Except in the case of UT3, with which I mistakingly veered from that path because I once had faith in Epic.
Just because you don't do that doesn't mean the rest of the gaming community doesn't do it. If 99% of the gamers didn't go to forums as you mention, then who are all of the people on all of the game sites? I'm not talking just forums.epicgames.com but all game related sites and their subforums, which includes publishers, hosting sites, etc.
I go to forums prior to purchasing games not to see if other people like it or not, but to see what issues people are having. The TV ads and web site screenshots don't tell us everything about the game, if you want to know what issues people are running into, the forums are the place to go. Whenever I go to a game developer's or publisher's website to check out a game I'm interested in buying, I always click on the forums area and have a look for a few minutes.
My game purchases are based close to 50:50 on WoM and forums.
With almost all demos I play local only (eg. Instant Action), so I never had any issues with the UT200x or UT3 demos. I almost never try online with the demos because the "demo" servers are usually useless.
And myself and probably most other gamers who try the beta and/or walk into stores and pick up a box don't download a "trial" copy of the game over BitTorrent first to try it out...
I'm sure that places you into the minority on that one.
