So this discussion is not about wheter they should or shouldn't, its a discussion about HOW they should.
For what purpose? You think you're bringing anything new to the table? Ragging on BRL for their marketing efforts (as they are) is like everyones pet peeve around here.Personally I find myself agreeing more or less with what Dark Half is saying. Why do you personally care how much effort BRL puts into advertising? Do you own stock? As long as they're making enough to stay in business, why should you care how they market themselves? It's not like Mark and Simon are new to this whole software thing. Heck, they've been making and publishing software since I was a kid!
So they aren't doing it the way you would do, or the way the guys over at TGC are doing or the guys at Idigicon, or the guys at Epic. Is that against the law or something?
Also, why do you think that if BRL does good marketing, advertisement and produces tools, the userbase will be less productive and be less satisfying? Because that is what you are saying in fact.
I'll take a crack at that. Marketing, advertisments and tool production takes time away from BRLs primary business - the development of a high level games oriented programming language. Now less time spent on their primary business (what we're actually good at, if you consult your books) means that upgrades and patches will take longer to develop - when upgrades and patches take longer to develop the people who rely on these upgrades or patches in their current projects will naturally get less productive, as a particular show stopping bug grinds production to a halt (or worse, makes them switch to a different product), while they wait more or less patiently for BRL to release a long overdue patch or 3D module.Sure marketing and advertising will help you ship products - no questions there - but long time commitment and focus on primary business areas, will keep existing customers happy in the long run, and generate a lot less animosity (like how everyone hates BarkBasic, for not being what it's cracked up to be and because DBS [now TGC] had a reputation for outright lying to their customers).
Dark Basic in it's current incarnation is still effectively broken software. At no point in it's 3+ year lifespan was there ever a version that could reasonably be considered "safe for production" - this despite the fact that DBS had more funds, arguably better marketing and more full-time employees than BRL. Personally, I prefer the better product to the better marketed one - but I realise that as a person who slings marketing BS for a living, that concept may seem alien to you.
While it seems silly to be telling BRL to market themselves better, doing so would make the community more active, and draw in more people with good knowledge of stuff -- which would positively affect what I can do with Blitz products.
Be careful what you wish for, and all that. While I can see how what you're saying seems logical, the facts of the matter seems to indicate otherwise.First of all, a more active community would seem to suggest a less productive one. Secondly, and more importantly, the larger the community, the larger the signal/noise ratio, thus making it much harder to actually find what you're looking for.
For instance I never visit the code archives anymore - there's just too much information there, and digesting it all to see if the code I need already exists, is often more time consuming than just writing it all from scratch.