Hello dear TS rewind team,
I have been a follower of this project since its birth and I must say I respect each and every one of you for sacrificing your spare time to do this. But I must also bring forth some criticism regarding how this project is handled because I think overall such criticism can be beneficial.
Let's be honest here, the hype generated by TS rewind is meager to say the least. I base this assumption on the amount of feedback this site as well as the FB page have generated, which is not very much, especially considering how many people got mobilized by the innitial "100k strong for TS4" idea. The hype didn't carry over. I think there is a lot of potential that is lost here because I am certain that many more people would be interested in this project. If they knew about it at least.
And here we come to the core of my criticism: The PR for this project hasn't really been all that great. Considering how young this is and how little there is to show, I certainly do not blame you. But I still think that with just a little bit of effort, you could gain a lot of new followers.
Let's start with the presentation: I am sure unless people link their friends the website directly, the first time people will encounter the TS rewind project is on facebook. And what they see is a rather half-assed page that shows a bit of disorganized information bits and also hasn't been updated in weeks. In fact, updates have become a rare sight and it gives the impression that there is really not much going on. I think one improvement to make would be just more updates, if possible on a regular basis. It doesn't have to be every day but once a week would be nice. Maybe in form of a developers blog that talks about all the stuff that has been created. You could also get away with once a month as long as it's regular and follows an organized template.
Then there is the design of the website. It looks like a minor point and in the grand scheme it is, but if you are a regular internet user and you find a site that just uses a cheap, out-of-the-box wordpress skin with a plain color background, then this suggests to you, subconsciously, that the project isn't really all that serious. Having a functional webpage is one thing, and it's a good thing. But I think a nice design would make a way better first impression, and those are the ones that stick.
Also, I don't think that really many people know about this project and you cannot blame them. Unless you happened to look at your facebook feed at the time this site was created and you had announcements of the 100k for TS4 project appearing in your news feed, I think the chances to randomly stumble upon this project are very slim. There is very little exposure for this project which is sad. With regular updates, you could try to push them on social media sites like reddit and with time more people would notice them.
I would like to give you an example of a project that started just like this one. A team of rogue developers working in their free time on a video game. Unlike you, they started completely from scratch and didn't have a famous IP name to work with. Still, they managed to gain quite a bit of fame for their work. I'm talking about
Katawa Shoujo. The project started on 4chan and was mainly carried by its userbase. The devs stayed in contact with the fans over all the years of development and thus kept the hype levels up. The user base in turn was responsible for spreading the message about the game. I am not suggesting to use that site in particular to help you gain more followers for this, but it's just one of the many alternatives.
I don't know if you really care about all of this at this point or even made plans to make changes once you got more content to show off or whatever, but I still wanted to express my opinion on this.
Cheers!
