I’m still asking this question to myself. After the sense of purpose and meaning the week of Malathedra gave me, I now have to go on and figure out what I’m doing next. it’s amazing how the marketing business is like being in a traveling circus. It takes planning, it’s hela-fun when you finally perform, and then you’re depressed when it’s all over. Right now I’m at that stage of depression and boredom.
Well that’s why I have this blog. I can now show the constant cycle of one side to my life. Doesn’t that sound fun? 😉
Anyway you’re all starving for my reaction to how exactly the week of Malathedra went, right? Comparing the visitor count data from the first week that the Announcement PR was sent out to the week of Malathedra PR, lets just say it didn’t work out as well as we had hoped or did it?
For those of you who don’t know, Raymond Jacobs (head of EDI Games) and I planned out a week of marketing for Malathedra. We discussed what would be released each day and then I would send out a press release about it on the day of its release.
I would say that we did accomplish what we originally set out to achieve, regain the interest in potential buyers. When you’ve read multiple comments saying “I want to pre-order this game” there is a warm feeling that comes to the heart.
The Week of Malathedra Website Statistics:
Day 1 – 86 visits – Screenshots
Day 2 – 118 visits – Music Clips
Day 3 – 199 visits – Gameplay Videos
Day 4 – 179 visits – Wallpaper and Avatars
Day 5 – 115 visits – Trailer
Day 1 – Can we say screw up? From what I can judge not all websites that I expected posted this first PR initially. Why I have no idea. But it was on the next couple of days that the screenshots finally appeared.
Day 2 – When users listened to these clips they understood that Malathedra is first a true adventure game. Having a track that sounds similar to Monkey Island, allows gamers to hear that we know what good adventure games are.
Day 3 – The gameplay videos allowed us to build off of the sense that the players got from hearing the music. Visually they saw the comedic elements that have been developed throughout Malathedra. Comedy next to story is the reason why anyone plays adventure games.
Day 4 – Well we had to stretch things out a little bit here. Obviously after getting gamers excited we had to give them something to take back with them. What better way is there than wallpapers and avatars?
Day 5 – For the last day we found it appropriate to save the best for last. A trailer would be the ultimate thing (mainly because it’s too early to release a public demo).
So why were the stats not as stellar as theywere with the first Announcement PR? There are a couple of reasons for this. For the majority of the updates, users did not have to go directly to Malathedra.com in order to view them. Most websites published the materials on their own websites. Only the gamers with an actual interest in the game visited the homepage. The only day where users had to visit the homepage to see the update was on day 5 with the trailer, but I believe that the image quality of the trailer hurt potential coverage from these exact game sites that covered Malathedra for all the previous days. Why would anyone recommend their users to view a pixalatted video?
Even with all of this in mind, I commend EDI Games for being one of the few indie game development companies to think and execute a marketing strategy from development day 1. EDI is several months from releasing any sort of demo and already thousands of people know about the game. With EDI’s first game Morning’s Wrath, marketing campaign didn’t actually start until after the game was released! I’m 100% sure that this impacted sales to some extent. The question that has yet to be answered is: will marketing Malathedra this early in development improve sales? It almost seems as if gamers might forget about Malathedra and EDI will have to spend extra time reminding gamers over and over again when the game is coming out. Is this wasted time that could be used for developing the game or is this actually creating buzz? We’ll just have to wait till 2007 when the game is finally released! Sorry, I don’t know the ending to this story.
