city of heroes had no ad budget. once their game was free to play, none carried it. having it on game store shelves was the only advertising it got.
you cannot make later versions to put on shelves. mmos really cannot do this. so.....
i suggest ingame items that can ONLY be bought in a store. a walkin store. like gamestop. perhaps they will even allow a poster for the game for a short while, or as long as the items are available. perhaps low impact items that were popular in city of heroes would be best. not that ALL purchasable items would go into the gamestop store.
making different colored glowing eyes only purchasable at gamestop would keep the game in front of people who have a chance to see it. gamestop gets a cut to keep doing so. each code would only work once, per character. each code would only be also for one color that must be picked at time of purchase.
i think only gamestop could pull of this marketing trick, and make your venture some much needed money. advertising that pays for itself, and more.
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
The game store is a dying breed - even the consoles are pushing the digital download medium real hard. Now - it may take a while for the game store to completely disappear, but I don't think it would be a good investment - at least on the large-scale. And "exclusive items" that you only get by buying at "store X" have always rubbed me the wrong way - it's effectively "day 1 DLC".
The more effective way to advertise IMHO would be youtube. I'm serious - if you can get footage of your game on youtube being played by a gamer or two with a serious following - word will spread. This is, of course, in addition to making the rounds on the various gaming news sites.
I believe this to be a correct interpretation. Along with making videos for YouTube, allocate some advertising money toward well known YouTube channels to review a demo version of the game.
Get the buzz going, and then you might not even need money to get vloggers to start showing up at your door asking to preview the game.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
I would even go so far as to say that Special Things you Only Buy in Certain Stores aren't even a deal made for the sake of the game or its developers; that's the sort of deal that benefits the store. If I can buy a copy of a game and have it ready to play in an hour or a few from the comfort of my bed or living room, why should I got to a store to purchase something?
Special game content that I can only get [i]at that store[/i], that's why. You don't go to a game store to buy games because that's where the games are anymore. You go there to get games because there's extra content you can only get from [i]that store[/i].
[color=#ff0000]Composition Team[/color]
You don't put a product out on the market with out first identifying your target market and then analyzing their habits. One thing that made CoH great was the wide range of people that played it. It wasn't unheard of to run a mish with a 60 year old woman. If your talking physical retail locations then a broader spectrum where more of the public frequents like a target or best buy is a better bet. I personally bought CoV at target and I'm currently passing the time with GW2 which I bought at best buy.
The initial goal should be to get as many people as possible to purchase and play at launch and the best way to do that is by reaching those people that played CoH/CoV, and by tapping into new MMO players. Talking it up in the games we are all currently passing the time in is probably the best use of "free" advertising dollars. Of course YouTube and all other social media outlets should be used as well.
Spend the bulk of your cash on banner ads on websites and on print ads based on the target market you are trying to reach.
On day of launch you sit down and reevaluate your marketing strategy based off you current state.
hmmm.
i am afraid their is no advertising budget.
i looked long at hard at the city of heroes fans, 99 percent of them were 27-45. i did this through fansites that listed real names and ages. no kiddies. gamestop and other places have younger generations that would play. and they only stop in to buy a game, and look at the posters.....
only utuber pewdiepie seems to garner any real clout. i do not seem him playing ANY mmo games.
so, my suggestion is quite good, as i have already looked into the other possible outcomes, for city of heroes no less. they also chose to ignore this option. remember gamestop sells one of the few magazines in PRINT to sell several million copies a month. ad space is far too expensive, but a poster instore, might just be a ad for them to sell more items......
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
No ad budget? Forgive me, but I distinctly remember being 11 and seeing the ads for City of Villains ALL OVER Gamespot/GameFAQs/MMORPG when it was announced and everywhere else when it finally came out which led to me coming in and becoming the greatness I am today. Ads were everywhere too when Going Rogue was announced/came out.
The difference between then and Freedom was that by that point, everyone who really cared pretty much already knew about CoH and more than likely was up to speed with the news, so advertising wasn't exactly necessary. Also, bugfixes and content kinda have a bigger priority than advertising when you're a game older than 5 years..
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
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when i tell people in world of warcraft about city of heroes, and then send them some videos, they all but poo themselves and try to download it. a bit too late.
the most advertising i saw was the strategy guides. and one cardboard standup for city of villains. which when i asked, was only in the wargaming tabletop shop to block the sun coming in from the huge window they had.
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
I question your methods, all that says is that people who were CoH fans who frequented those websites were in that age bracket, not a random sample, probably depended on the other games shown on those websites. Many CoH players were those for whom CoH was their first and only MMO so would be unlikely to frequent general gaming websites.
Many of the people I played with were older than that, I was 46 at shutdown and frequently the youngest on teams I was playing in, some of them playing with their kids who were younger than that age bracket.
Also were you required to give your age on those websites ? I guess people older than that would be less likely to list their ages if they could avoid it.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
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I am in "The Older Gamers" guild (a cross game collection of people over 25 years old) where being old, taking your time and kicking back is a bonus....
I firmly disagree. I knew lots of people, some of whom played other MMOs who had never heard of CoH before I told them about the game. Anybody in the know will tell you that if you aren't actively trying to grow the business you can expect to be out of business. Now we can argue about the most effective ways to reach people but to say advertising reaches the stage where it isn't necessary... wow.
IMHO if you have someone "hooked" on a game you pretty much already have their support unless you do something drastic to torque them off. To use your example of higher priorities: bug fixes in CoH sometimes took in the order of years and content was up and down. At the very least you could say that the CoH developers were unafraid to take measures that upset portions of the player base (ED, pvp, others). And yet, some people remained loyal. Many to this day. But eventually some people do reach the stage where they do walk away. And with no marketing effort to replace them. You get what you wound up with in CoH in terms of player population numbers. That is why the superhero genre can be so hot and the business success of CoH was so lukewarm outside of the diehard fans.
One thing that Wizards of the Coast does that I feel keeps Magic: the Gathering fairly fresh in my mind, even when I'm not playing it, is they release a new set of cards to collect every 3 months (4 sets per year). They also have some other stuff now and then (Commander seems to be an annual boxed set release, etc). Now, Wizards can do this because they have something brand new to tell you about and try to sell you every 3 months. Nevertheless, this tends to be the time when old players return and current players buy stuff to update their collections, etc. So while I don't know if CoT will have anything new worth trying to sell people once every 3 months, I think they need to at least refresh people's memory of CoT and remind people that it's there, or inform new people who never heard of it, not all the time, just every so often. Just getting out the message "Play City of Titans" to people will be enough, for some of them, to look at it and say "CoT? What's that?". Again, not a constant thing, just the occasional "blood drive" type thing to push for new players on a regular basis, but infrequently enough to avoid making it an expensive thing ofr MWM and a constant annoyance to the people being advertized to. The message being "Now is the right time to jump into CoT if you're so inclined."
As for younger gamers, if the popularity of the Marvel movies doesn't give ALL things "superhero" some good coat tails to ride, I don't know what will.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Agreed. The main place I see ads for your online games is through youtube either through ads or trailers as well as gameplay footage.
Regardless, I feel gameplay videos is the mark people try to hit. I myself only ever buy a game after seeing what the in-game play looks like and perhaps see a portion played. Putting your game on display to play at conventions likely can get you the hype needed to get the players to post the games on youtube and then it's a race to see which youtubers can get their videos up first so their channel gets the upfront buzz when searched for.
Honestly, I think if your aim is to get the faithful CoH players to try CoT, simply advertising it as a highly customizable superhero game. Linking it to its competitor, CoH, might not be the best move as it will paint people's expectations but if the game is similar enough, that might be a good strategy. If there's enough freshness in the mission and story, you could even be so bold as to call the game a "comic book simulator" as well. Yeah, I guess it might not be and you'd get the players nit-picking every point that counts against the game as a "comic book simulator" but nitpickers need something to do too.
Best advertising is always word of mouth so far we have 5712 people registered on the forums so if each person told at least 5-10 people by launch we should have a decent amount of people buying the game or at the very least trying it out
i was shocked too. but then there was never much moaning, or cursing in chat, so now i know where all the unhappy 12 year-olds were....... not in coh.
this game must succeed. i am tired of the world of warcraft clones. marketing gone foul. sigh.
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
Word of mouth is considered the best form of advertising because it implies that those who hear about the product do so from what is, to them, a reliable source. This means that they are considerably more likely to try the product than if they had seen a traditional advert. The weakness of word of mouth advertising is that it does not offer much penetration (unless you're very luck and have something that goes viral).
One advantage MWM has is that they will have a product - the avatar builder - with which they can advertise well before the game is finished.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I despise this kind of "advertising." Does that mean I have to go EVERY store to get ALL the content, picking up multiple copies of the same game? I also despise nickel and dime-ing players to death.
I bought CoH on an impulse buy in 2004. I had been playing EQ for a few years and was looking for a new MMORPG. I happened to be in Wal-Mart and came across the CoH box. "hmmm... a Super Hero MMORPG. Cool!" $30 and an hour or so later, I was creating my first (of many) heroes.
About advertising. In this day and age, there are soooo many FREE advertising avenues, it is almost ridiculous. Facebook is the number one place, followed closely by Twitter. Advertising is why I have no accounts with either of them. Then you have YouTube (and other video hosting sites), message boards galore, and bloggers everywhere one turns.
I appreciate marketing folks and the job they have chosen to do. I just get of seeing it everywhere in life. I guess one could say I am "over-marketed." :)
- Al
I figure after we say grace and are about to cut the turkey at thanksgiving I will just scream at family and friends !!!!! CITY OF TITANS IS COMING !!!!! :-)
if getting gamestops ceo involved is a bad thing, then perhaps utube ads?
hmmmm.
i really wanted a poster in every gamestop and the clerks could hand out passes or codes.
it would have to be a funny, or very clever live action ad. not easy to pull off.
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
Ad block helps quite a bit with that...
But this is the thing though, whilst you might not have an account with X/Y/Z, that does not mean that the company shouldn't be using it though to help spread the word.
When City of Heroes first awarded an aura via a facebook promotion, it was to help spread the word amongst the friends of the player base... the more it got liked, the more people that saw it, so on and so forth.
Now sure, it might not have needed the reward to do so, but I had already liked the official facebook page when it went up a while back, so I had already done my "spam" a period before hand.
HOWEVER, players still did it, and I am sure that it is indeed possible that some *old* players of the game returned when they saw the fact that one of their friends had liked the page.
Turns out that a few of my friends who I went to uni with had played City of Heroes early on in its life, but had left for x/y/z reasons. Them, seeing *me* like the page, got them to at least *think* about restarting the game (I am sure that a couple actually came back as well for a period of time).
But if it wasn't for that offer running... they quite possibly wouldn't have thought twice about the game. They had already left it.
So there is a reason as to why facebook/twitter gets used. It is like the "word of mouth" style of advertising, just a lot less effort on your part to do so.
Unless of course you are referring to the "promoted" stuff, where the company pays for that to get shoved in the face of people... that is the kind of stuff that I am not so keen on, but something that require people to do stuff to help spread the word is better in my mind.
Yeah, it gets annoying when all of your friends all like the same thing, but sometimes that happens. I have been in public places, where I was the only person not interested in something, whilst the rest of my friends were chatting about something else.
It happens sometimes.
Relevant: a [url=http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221177/Are_developers_actually_paying_for_YouTuber_and_press_coverage.php]Gamasutra[/url] article.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Slightly relevant: a [url=https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MyXcr6sDRtw] a YouTube video[/url]
But partially about innovating games, YouTube uploading policies and a bit of humor mixed in.
WoW kinda grew before vloggers were so popular though, but it's a different market from when it got is start. .. You can only get free publicity with vloggers.
good find. i my need to make a cheap live action ad, or find some friends who have slots fall out. they make money via views, but need content that thrills. making a funny video of this game could be a thing that they could do for free. like:
the cab driver talking to the guy in the backseat. the camera. as the cabbie keeps talking about titan city, here and there odd things happen all around. all of which does not faze the cabbie one bit. like, meteors hitting the sidewalk, 4 cops trying to pull down a costumed supervillian, a guy that looks like he is out of a streetfighter game punching a alien into the sky, etc. ending with the cabbie saying, "welcome to the home of gentle giants. welcome, to titan city"
if everything else sucks, then do it yourself. this game will be a success.
dammit, you know the gamestop ceo is not a bad guy. this is the kind of good PR he is always looking for. are discs really impossible? a special ingame item like a green cowboy hat made only for gamestop shoppers would stand out to the people he then has to get on board.
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
Advertising budget for City of Titans = [b]PAYING[/b] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/samuraiko]Samuraiko Productions[/url] to make videos of City of Titans.
I challenged Black Pebble on multiple occasions to [i]buy lunch[/i] for Michelle Travis during the two CoH Player Summits. He wouldn't even go that far (boo!).
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I second Red's suggestion! MWM will need to do some good tempting, though, cuz right now she seems most interested in the rez of CoX.
Spurn all ye kindle.
not all of cox's music was theirs, only rented. what if this game rents it before them? even it it happens? lol. coX will have some music holes...
i was looking at this: http://youtu.be/7_fPtazfALA
and this: http://youtu.be/QOdW1OuZ1U0
and i was thinking i have 4 weeks paid vacation (and two more weeks paid vacation for nycc 2014 ultra vip, whoo!) and i need a hobby. only 1 out of five graduates from high school in america can read. this game could make them learn, as comic books made me learn, at a early age. i think i can pull off something about at the level of the first video in this post, alas, the second one is beyond me.
look at pepsi and coca cola. they ARE their ads. city of heroes i suspect had city of heroes 2 in production when they were shut down. the copyright offices said paragon had filed for the rights in 2011. sigh.
we need a viral video. (though amvs would be great too) one for :girls, boys, older people (55 plus) each one would make a person send it to more people just like themselves, to pass on for the entertainment value of the ad alone. a bit sneaky, but one can do this with just utube. we have 2 plus years, the ad only needs one year before launch.
have to look up some lore or backround stuff like locations or symbols that can be incorporated.
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
Another [url=http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/222408/How_to_get_your_game_covered_by_YouTubers.php]Gamasutra article[/url] about YouTube coverage.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I would say that this also applies to livestreaming sites as well... Twitch.tv and Hitbox.tv spring to mind.
I know of at least one human who might be interested in this game who is incapable of internet banking,
I also hate advertising in general, particularly for being disruptive (and certainly not fitting into target groups)
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advertising is fun!
http://youtu.be/T7MDMdfcRfI
What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate. - Henry David Thoreau
Pay for advertising? Nah... how about on launch day you get some players to stream their first experience with the game. Creating that first character, seeing all the options for the first time (unless they beta tested)... just make sure you have the players willing to do it set in advance. It's a novel approach, one that would likely get free press on some if not all of the gaming sites. The sites list the players and times they are going to start, people tune in. Of course, you run the risk of it all going horrible wrong if the servers can't handle the player load like some recent games that have come out...
Considering that Twitch TV is pretty much the "go to" website for a lot of online streaming options, getting onto the front page does a LOAD of good.
Who would have thought that 50,000 people would watch someone play Super Metroid (or Zelda/Zelda 2/Zelda 3) or any of the old classic console games (granted, this was for a charity event, but it was still good)
Front page coverage there is a *god send*. It shows people what the game is like, and it can tempt new people into buying it...
I know I have bought a few games just because some speed runners that I follow have picked up Risk of Rain or Crypt of The Necrodancer and played it for an hour or two on their stream.