Wednesday 18 June 2008, by Nindir
Now that we’re finishing off 1.5, I thought I’d tell you about our upcoming plans for how we’re going to market Pirates. We’ve been waiting on 1.5 as it has lots of great fit and finish features that improve the game significantly. While there’s more to come in 1.6 (including new tutorials) we think 1.5 is the right build to start up the new marketing initiatives.
SOE’s strategy in marketing the game for launch was twofold—good retail box presence, and focusing on saturation ads on a couple of big web sites. That’s not unreasonable for a launch, but what we’re focusing on now is making the game easy to get into and to expose it to a wide audience. To that end, we’re starting free trials in July (towards the middle or latter part) which will let players try out the game for 14 days and see if it’s for them. We’ve done the work to make sure players can’t use a trial account as a mule account or to spam other players, and at the end of the 14 days, they can convert those accounts into real accounts and continue playing with their character.
At the same time, in order to support the trials, we’re finally going to start marketing back up. We’ll be handling this directly, and focusing on a very different style than what happened with launch. Specifically, we’ll be running ads on a continual basis instead of trying to do one huge, brief surge. The ads will talk about the game, and will be focused on the free trials and getting players quickly into the game.
We’re pretty excited with 1.5. We’re spent a lot of time just reacting to the launch, and now we’re finally getting over that hump which lets us be more proactive about the features and direction of the game. With the new marketing and free trials for next month, it’s going to generate a lot of new players, and I hope that all of you will help in welcoming them into the fold.
Russell Williams
Flying Lab Software
