A few fan blogs, like mine, promote Myst-Uru and point to the Myst site. Myst-Uru has made the news on some other non-fan related gaming blogs, like Massively. Most of them point to the Myst site. Myst Style builds in other platforms have made the news and most of those refer people back to the Myst site.

So, the game has good internet placement and promotion. Something like 400 to 700 new players per week is common. I don’t remember seeing actual login stats regarding actual players posted anywhere. So, we have no idea how many of the new accounts, if not most, are spammers attempting to promote their products.

So, I don’t see a need to increase promotion of the Uru Live game.

The Movie Affect

When the Myst Movie releases it will be a major introduction to Myst for millions of people that have never heard of Myst. We will see a huge influx of new users and visitors to the game and Myst Forum. Regardless of what the movie industry does, the existing links and sites lead to the existing Myst Online site. There is no way to remove all that data and links from the search engine data bases.

Rand Interview May 2012

Dumping millions of people into the Myst-Uru-Live game as it is will create a problem. There is a difference between the new participants arriving after seeing the movie and the initial participants of the newly released Uru Live in 2003.

In 2003 the problem was MMOG’s being relatively new and people were just learning how to play them. Uru Live was my first MMOG, as it was for many others. So, the game interface, play, performance, and security as we see them in the game now were adequate for the time.

Game technology and graphics quality have made great strides in the last 9 years. Now virtual worlds created by armatures in numerous OpenSim worlds and Second Life are starting to rival and in some ways surpass the existing Uru Live Plasma based game.  (Plasma is the game engine use to build and run Uru Live.)

Second Life by John “Pathfinder” Lester – Flickr

The influx of people from a Myst movie will have just seen state of the art CGI, probably in 3D. The Existing Uru Live is going to look pretty lame coming from that context. So, as much as Myst-Uru fans love Uru Live, they tend to look at Uru Live as a mom looks at a child, I doubt it will cut it.