Marketing SE V

[TerranC]

Originally posted by Captain Kwok:
To be honest, I kind of like Space Empires as our little secret. I'd hate to see a bunch of low-attention span gamers come in and make all sorts of mischief.

I feel the same way; our own little treehouse, safely tucked away from the rest of the internet, away from internet cooties

[dogscoff]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Memetic marketting. You create an advert so cool/funny/entertaining that everyone emails it to their friends who
send it to their friends...

I recommend a little game: Druk-man or such ('mineral planets are the best!'). You stick a great big advert for SE5 on it and then release it into the wild. Within a month there could be thousands of potential customers checking out Malfador's site.

A few such games were created and posted here a while back. I remember there was a simple scrolling shooter that used graphics from SE4. Something along those lines would be ideal.

[Baron Munchausen]

This is also called 'viral marketing' and is likely to get more and more difficult because of all the virus and spam problems plaguing the net. People will have to get more wary about cute emails 'from friends' and anti-spam/anti-virus filters will become more and more persnickety.

'Ordinary' marketing via the Internet is not that difficult or expensive anyway. MM just needs a truly excellent game and a few good reviews on the game sites. SE IV is good but not really excellent. It has some problems, like no way to control micro-management. The reason it got noticed by so many after the debacle of MOO 3 is that it doesn't suck as much as MOO 3. If it were really great it would have sold millions of copies with all the notice it got.

[ February 13, 2004, 02:45: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[dogscoff]

This is also called 'viral marketing'

I was going to write that in my post the first time 'round, but Last time I did that someone posted "I don't think it's a good idea to write viruses, even for marketting purposes" and the whole thread wandered off into definitions of viral marketting for a few pages...

[se5a]

adds in popular commics such as PVP. they do some prety funny adds. dotn know how much he would charge for a thing like that though.

[newbie123]

Originally posted by PvK:
I don't think "getting a game onto retail shelves" is going to help much. Games can exist on store shelves and still be ignored by the moronic masses and their clueless gift-shopping relatives. Most games on retail shelves lose money for the publisher and developer, because the retail stores squeeze almost all of the sales money for themselves. And, even many pretty hard-core gamers would wait to get a deal from retail bargain bins and sales, rather than buying the game directly from Shrapnel. Total rewards from such a shift might even go down. Er, I could ramble on with various conjecture, but I've a headache and other things to do. The magazine coverage (reviews) is probably the most effective channel. Some magazine and/or web banner ads after the reviews go out might also help, though print mag ads are so expensive that I'd doubt worthwhile sales returns for a non-eye-candy-feast game. Fans subtley hitting semi-relevant forums and newsGroups periodically (such as forums for lamer but better-advertized conquest games) with plugs and links would probably help a lot, it seems to me.

Ergh, headache.

PvK

That's true. This game will only ever be so popular, just for the fact that it doesn't have "mad tyte graphics" or crap like that. Which is fine by me, as long as the game is fun, I could care less.

However, SE4 is not reaching its potential fanbase at all. This game has been out for 4 years, and I just heard about it on the galactic civilizations Boards a few days ago. I also keep pretty good track of my strategy games, so not to brag or anything but I was quite surprised that this game eluded me for so long.

My recommendations(not that they matter) - Stay away from retail, but try harder to get the word out. Many people want a 4x space strat game, but thing Moo3 is their only option. If you put some ads out on the gaming websites, maybe even take a few ads out in the magazines, I'm sure your sales would sore. Getting the occasional review in CGW or PC gamer wouldn't hurt either(This may have happened, I don't know tho).

One final thing, allow purchasers of the ame to download it while they are waiting for it to ship . Can't wait for my copy to come wednesday (I hope)

Later

[BlackRose]

Yeah the marketing aspect of this franchise is somewhat lacking, indeed If not for Atrocities and his appearance on a outdated BoTF (Birth of the Federation) message board I doubt i'd ever have heard of this brilliant little gem of a game. I started doing my homework on it and was surprised at how little there was and how many broken links there were. If i had stumbled upon it by any other means I'd probably have decided it was a dead game.

Thank goodness for that one in a million shot of me ending up on some obscure message board (once or twice every six monthes I search for BoTF2 news) and reading Atrocities post