Getting the word out there

Advertising and promoting anything can be a complete pain at the best of times. Who do you sell to? How do you sell to them? How do you attract their attention? Does it matter what you say? It really is the ultimate form of completely artificial conversation. Yes, voice overs really do talk like that in real life; when you spend everyday underlining and emphasising particular words to get the client’s message across, it becomes kind of habit forming. I find it almost impossible to type without talking out loud! With most of my clients I have to do a balancing act between what they feel they want and what my 30 years in advertising tells me will probably (but not definitely) work. After all, although I may understand advertising better than they, it is their business and they know it and understand it far better than I do.

An online game poses some rather unique challenges from the marketing point of view. The nearest established real life comparison I can make is probably advertising annual membership to a golf club. Although you are selling a single product, the game of golf, you are not just selling a single item, you are selling a time commitment; spending a couple of thousand on your annual membership fee is kind of crazy if you never actually play any golf! So, when an online game markets itself, it has to say not only “this game is fun,” but “you will enjoy playing it continuously hour after hour for the next year or more.”

That is a BIG sell for anyone – whatever your budget.

With Wurm Online, we don’t have one – budget that is.  Like most things in this life, money buys quality advertising. If you want to reach your desired audience you need to target your advertising by placing it in the right spot – and that costs! Cheap advertising space, on the other hand, means that you end up selling your self to people who are simply not interested – a waste of money.

However, with online games and other online services, people are not simply restricted to information via advertising. Vast amounts of online promotion is created by people talking about a product – and on the Internet, talk is free. So, for something like Wurm Online, there is, in theory, a vast potential promotional tool out there in the form of blogs, forum posts, submitted reviews and so on that does not cost money.

The risk you take, of course, is that not everyone who will talk about your product will necessarily say the right things – that does not mean that they hate your game, they may love it, but they may misrepresent the game in such a way as to miss the target audience. For instance, Wurm Online can be fairly grindy; it can be a long process to achieve anything. That is fair enough, but if someone writes a review saying how wonderful that your have to grind like mad, and how they spent joyful hour upon hour grinding away, then a potential player of the game may be thoroughly put off! Yes, Wurm has a lot of grind, but that is not the only thing about Wurm. (Listen to the Podcast at Rock Paper Shotgun to see what I mean – http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/05/01/the-rps-electronic-wireless-show-episode-17/)

But I think this is a minor risk in reality. Full, in your face, promotional prose pushes ideas very hard and effectively, and if that is unbalanced it can be detrimental to the product, but players writing about games that interest them, writing in the normally more casual style that suits better what they are trying to get over, will rarely hurt a game, unless that is the writers intention. (From my point of view, if you hate something that much, why write about it at all ? Seems a waste of a sunny afternoon!)

Rolf, understandably, loves to find reviews written by players about Wurm. They may or may not have got their heads round it and understood the game fully (especially if they have only just found it), but the fact that they have felt inspired to write something in the first place is good enough!

So, get out there and write about Wurm Online! Say nice things about it, put up pictures, and if you want a quote from Rolf or any member of the team to help your review, just ask!  If Rolf like what you have got published, and if it is in a well read site, then you never know, you might get a prezzie in your inventory. No guarantees, of course!

In the end, the more people that play, the more things Rolf can do with this game to make it better still – and that is what everyone wants.