|
Your time is an expense and there's always opportunity cost too. If you have X banner impressions, for instance, you could either use them on a very text MUD-oriented banner exchange or a very general games exchange, for instance. It's a finite resource that you have to choose how to allocate, and the cost for doing it inefficiently is whatever the value of your best other opportunity was.
We've never advertised in print magazines so I can't really comment on the efficacy of doing that. My reasoning for not doing so is that I feel like with a web/internet-only game, your best bet is to reach people via the net so that they can go straight into playing your game. Having to get them to walk to the computer and log in or remember your web address for next time they're online seems like it'd be less efficient to me, though again, that's purely an educated guess on my part.
We definitely don't intend to stop advertising to non-text MUDers, mainly because we're already promoted pretty well to text players, and there aren't that many text players in the world. It's expensive to reach out, but it sort of has to be done.
Incidentally, despite spending a fair amount each month on advertising, word of mouth is still BY FAR our biggest player attractor. It's bigger than Mudconnector, TMS, Zmud, and all our other ads combined in terms of results. One lesson to be drawn from that, I suppose, is that the best way to get get players is to ensure you have a decent proportion of very happy players who will act as evangelists for your game when talking to their friends. It's ok to have very unhappy players (though I'm sure everyone would prefer not to), but you really need those super happy players who will preach the virtues of your game.
--matt
|