TL:DR No players, no game. Wrong players, no game.

A comment in another thread got me thinking about death spirals.

The forums in all current games are filled with people complaining about their personal Injustice of the Week (IotW)(tm). But in most games the majority of players just don't care. The complainers are a vocal minority. They may be opinion leaders -- but more and more that role seems to be falling to youtube, twitch and the more traditional avenues of media reviews and word-of-mouth.

I have placed more weight, in the past, on the informal "first play" videos of regular gamers than I have on the forums. For DUST 514 they have generally been neutral or negative. Surprisingly, recently, they have been more positive. Not good, just better. There are several excellent "professional" HOW-TO youtube series -- but they are increasingly trending more negative.

Unfortunately, for DUST 514, all the other channels of review have either ignored the game or been negative from the start. And as the player population becomes more concentrated in long-term die-hard players the vocal minority is becoming the vocal majority and it's hangers-on.

For the player base this is a death spiral. The rate of adoption of new players slows as existing players create a more and more hostile environment for new players. The long term players become increasingly bitter. When they give up the people that are left are even more hostile and with no new blood in the game they become more bitter and more of them leave.

CCP can be as committed as it wants to building DUST 514. They can reorganize, restaff, and drive hard for better mechanics, more content and polished design. But they need a body of players that is representative of the general population of players to test their work against.

I don't have their internal numbers but I suspect they don't have that at this stage of the game. What they have is those long term players that simply don't represent the universe of players that, in the long run, will be necessary to sustain the game.

Lastly, CCPs marketing has be abysmal. The spokespeople have been disconnected with the initial target community and the channel messages have been superficial. I don't know why. I suspect that the lack of discipline in the project overall combined with a fundamental misunderstanding of the target community has contributed to the marketing confusion.

There are three things I believe should factor into CCP's thinking if they hope to persist.
1) Clearly identify the community you need to sustain the game you want to build.
1) Recognize the target player base you need may well not be the player base you have.
2) Give marketing a clear target, integrate it with development and fund it at a level where it can effectively drive the game's image.

In the end, no matter how committed: no players, no game -- target the wrong community or fail to understand the community you really need, no game.