Tyreth and I have discussed this several times; while we're not officially 'the marketing people' (and I would hope never to have an official title with 'marketing' in it), it is of interest to us.
As I see it, we get one shot for publicity just because of who we are. The minute we announce ourselves to, say, Slashdot, we're going to get a horde of people, 80% of whom will not contribute to the project, 10% of whom will contribute, get bored, and leave, and another 10% of whom may actually be useful. We must be adequetely prepared for this, needless to say.
So my question is: Do you think we should use our one shot for v0.1? I'd prefer to wait until the dev team is really clamoring for more hands; v0.3 is probably not going to be a huge jump assets-wise from v0.2 (it's basically the research tree, so a lot of graphic placeholders, but the graphics themselves don't need to be done; it's mostly design work). v0.4 is really going to be the kicker, and so what I'm thinking now is that we hold off announcing anything until we release v0.2 or v0.3.
Also because, as cool as v0.1 will be, it won't be all that fun to play. It'll be pretty and functional, but it's not really a game, per se. :>
You could have a more optimistic look that says, because we're FreeOrion, we can maintain public interest for a while and so should steadily issue press releases and such as we progress. I can be persuaded to this viewpoint, because we've had a significant level of interest even before v0.1 (namely, all of you!). I tend to err on the side of being conservative, though, or at least not trying to fix a problem that isn't there.
-Aq
