Just to throw in my
and to clarify a few things:
OOTP Developments has several times in the past asked its players for ideas on marketing. Markus et al are always open to feedback and actively seek it - nobody thinks the game is perfect, including themselves. Several good suggestions (and a few crazy ones, probably mostly my own) have been made in response to such requests over the years, and that's the reason why he still asks us, not that the company is in dire straits - it's small and doesn't have a marketing department, not dying.
Oddly enough, that marketing thread and the wish list for future versions is where most of the contents of this particular thread actually belong, but no worries.
Anyway, when additions to the game are contemplated, I think it would serve us all quite well to remember the costs involved. BMW raised that point quite nicely and others have added the point that increasing the complexity of the game includes a hidden cost of losing a segment of people who would just view it as just too much feature creep.
At least for the foreseeable future, I also agree that a good 3D graphics model is likely on a backburner that gets about as much heat as one of those toy ovens with a lightbulb. Sure, you could cook a poptart in about an hour, but do you really want that? (sorry, I'm hungry as I post this, hence the food metaphors). For the reasons already mentioned in previous posts, I would think a voice synthesizer would be in the same situation.
The ability to expand the game's userbase would allow such projects to become more fully funded - to turn up the heat, so to speak. Hopefully some of the marketing ideas bear fruit and the game will get that much closer to our Dream* (tm). Yeah, it would be nice for Markus to become spectacularly wealthy beyond our meager comprehension, but more importantly OOTP Developments would be able to send more funds more quickly toward improving the game.
I think the idea to expand the userbase beyond the baseball ultra-geeks that most of us are is a great one. How to do it is indeed the question at hand, and I appreciate everyone who brings serious ideas to the table, realistic or not, because it just takes one to really catch hold when you've already got a product as wonderful as the game we all currently enjoy.
Oh, and High Heat & MLB Power Pros 2009 were better games in my mind than The Show, but to each their own (and none hold a candle to OOTP for
my gaming pleasure)
.
*
Dream (proper noun): a lot of us would love OOTP to become the end-all-be-all baseball sim that had graphics galore, browser playability, statistical perfection, immersion factors out the wazoo, and would run like a champ on a 386SX-20, or perhaps even a TRS-80. Of course nobody expects that, but it's nice to wish for.