How can we make Xonotic more popular?

Discuss below.

riveting

I think the most obvious move is invite friends to play with you.
I've already made my 2 brothers play with me, and a friend of mine will likely try it out this evening.
If each player invites another, you effectively double the playerbase. 
If each invitee then invites another player, you increase the playerbase by 50%.
The percentage decreases in each succession if each new player only invites one person, but the number of players itself will keep increasing. And the more people we have the stronger this invitation effect will be.

Seo and PPC can help the xonotic to become popular and social media can also help to become popular.

Small thing you can do: Add Xonotic as "non-steam game" to your Steam library (in case you're using steam).  That way you kinda "spread the word" without much effort. If you have a lot of friends on Steam some might at least look it up, when they see you playing xonotic so much. I even added some pretty screenshots to my Profile. So some people who see my profile might check it out that way. I don't know how much it actually helps but i mean.. why not?

yell at strangers on the street

yell at strangers on the street

one problem: no one really can pronounce the name let alone remember it xD

yell at strangers on the street

Why yelling at strangers when you can simply wear your own custom Xonotic T-shirt (or sweater, cap...) in public

Or a Xonotic mask...

Apply for Jehar's Organgrinder and duel a friend (or an enemy) on Tastyspleen stream.

How about a snowball scheme of blackmailing people?
Like so:
I blackmail you to play xonotic regularily and have fun doing so while you got to blackmail at least 2 more people into doing the same.

Or a Xonotic mask...

Oh my... we don't want to be associated with maskers :^)

A new official release would probably help...

About adding new stuff is hard, everyone don't come and test the cake, they stay in the old stuff and refuse to learn the new because of their very closed mind...
Sorry for being pessimistic, but it's the harsh reality...  ._.

About adding new stuff is hard, everyone don't come and test the cake, they stay in the old stuff and they refuse to learn the new because of their very closed mind...
Sorry for being pessimistic, but it's the harsh reality...  ._.

The inconvenience of updating via autobuild or git while not having an understanding of what im actually updating for overweigths me wanting to update.

so you want documentation ranjid? HAHAHAHA

Autobuilds do indeed lack changelogs and average users should not be expected to use them. Their purpose is to give advanced users and developers a chance to see the latest development progress and potentially contribute to the project (in the case of Git or in issue reports).
Thankfully the latest developments see use on most of the popular servers, which are already showcasing what a new release would contain (outside of any visual improvements of course). This is a double-edged blade though, as it can also appear as if not much changed when a release does happen, since everyone has already played with the new improvements.
With the new year, it can seem like there is less hope for a release of the game, but the opposite is true; now more than ever there are developers joining the ranks and they are helping to resolve the major roadblocks preventing a release. The future is looking brighter for the game.


Regarding popularity of the game; Xonotic has always relied on word of mouth, the development team has always been small and as such has refrained from focusing precious resources on advertising the game in its beta stages.

Xonotic is a community-driven game, spread the word and help this community grow!

Responding to the original question:

Literally just word of mouth and possibly getting content creators to play it. That's all, really.

Autobuilds do indeed lack changelogs and average users should not be expected to use them. Their purpose is to give advanced users and developers a chance to see the latest development progress and potentially contribute to the project (in the case of Git or in issue reports).
Thankfully the latest developments see use on most of the popular servers, which are already showcasing what a new release would contain (outside of any visual improvements of course). This is a double-edged blade though, as it can also appear as if not much changed when a release does happen, since everyone has already played with the new improvements.
With the new year, it can seem like there is less hope for a release of the game, but the opposite is true; now more than ever there are developers joining the ranks and they are helping to resolve the major roadblocks preventing a release. The future is looking brighter for the game.


Regarding popularity of the game; Xonotic has always relied on word of mouth, the development team has always been small and as such has refrained from focusing precious resources on advertising the game in its beta stages.

Xonotic is a community-driven game, spread the word and help this community grow!

True. My point was more like why update if I dont even know whether or not I'm downloading any changes.

I just tell my IRC gaming buddies about it. A lot of them used to play Quake, Alien Arena, Assault Cube, Nexuiz etc. So they already dig that kind of game play.

trick question. you dont

yell at strangers on the street

unironically the best suggestion in this thread

• release on Steam
  
• make Android version
  
• one-click matchmaking as default that puts noobs seperate from veterans
  

Steam and Google Play are to games what Youtube and Facebook are to a video clip. If it cannot be found on those portals / markets (and no one cares why it can't be found there), it will not be visible to 99% of your audience because it has no chance to. There is nothing more to it. Making the game good and popular is another story, but just taking the first step for people to see it at all is not.

It does not even matter if the Android version sucks and is not playable. What matters foremost is that the name is listed there at all. 

At first I wanted to slap together an Android port myself. It is some work, but not that hard and I already paid the $20 fee for Google Play 10 years ago (any once registered Android developer can publish anything at no cost). The issue though is that Xonotic is stuck with a legacy engine and endless legacy problems when implementing anything new that required any amount of backporting (like instant matchmaking, new game modes with bomb planting or door/machine puzzles, stuff that would work much better on mobile, and of course any sort of mobile options, input handling, UI integration). So creating a port would always be a one-way street and it will never become something more than just being some bad misfit ripoff. It would be like any other Quake 1 ports to Android: you got your overlayed virtual controller mapped to mouse and certain keys and that is all there would be to it and ever will be. It could still work of course, when you make mobile-only servers. If everyone has the same handicap, then it is no issue at all. In the 90s people played Quake 1 with joysticks and it totally was fun, given that no one else was using a mouse. Remember the main goal here is for people to just recognize the game and maybe install it on mobile, then go like "damn, I should really try this on PC instead". Nowadays kids only use Android to browse games, those kids then become teenagers and then also own PCs. Most of gaming is done by kids/teenagers and then carried into early adulthood. So having a mobile presence really is integral on the long run. If you have seen the other "free" Android games then you know even a shitty mobile Xonotic does have a good chance to compete. But still all this work just as a marketing ploy to create something misfit and inferior with no dev future?; I would rather like to invest my time into porting the whole game to a modern engine, and then it would also run on Android with no real effort required, basically just at the click of a button. Before we know it, 5-10 years will be over and you have to ask what's the nature of the project and where will it lead us. That's also why I haven't started making an Android port: it is just too much of a long-term investment inside this legacy environment. One day a new sort of Xonotic will just appear in a modern future-proof engine and then this Xonotic will be like Rexuiz is now.

I think the only influx Xonotic has is from the Free Software community and people searching "free arena shooter" on Google, and only so because there is no real competition. Only 1% of all people use Linux, yet I bet you 30-50% of Xonotic players have it installed somewhere. This is because the Free Software scene acts like Youtube or Steam as a portal for marketing the game. It also implies that we are just not reaching some 97%, because Xonotic is not present on other portals / markets.

Matchmaking of course is key to keep newcomers, as well as having a low entry barrier by having noob-safe spaces. More newcomers = more players. Just let the formula do its magic.

Xonotic has a decent arena shooter influence. If we want to increase the player base we should focus on promoting the genre as a whole as it's fairly niche and most people who know about it are already retroFPS players or people who just left the genre.

This is very true, albeit it seems an impossible task to do. If you spent $20,000 today on generally promoting the demo scene through festivals and advertising in the next couple of months. How many more people would you really see specifically on the "Amiga 500" demoscene board next year? I guess not more than a few, if any. This is just like promoting Xonotic only through promoting Arena FPS.

On the other hand, if we could add new features to the game such as physics, building & crafting it would lift Xonotic out of the niche retro FPS genre and attract a lot more players. In terms of development cost, $20,000 for an open source project seems way over the top to push the migration to a modern engine and hence to pave the way for all the benefits and possibilities that it offers, including a huge influx of developers who are already familiar with the new game engine.

Like I said in the other thread, I am no longer available for the job and it needs multiple guys to pull it off, since the effort involved is quite high.

However in terms of ideas that get you the most bang for the buck, while also maintaining the health and prosperity of the project, I think we should really consider this as the way forward. Even if it seems rather unattainable at first.