[Soleil]

Firstly, I apologize if this thread or one similar already exists around here.. I briefly remember one recently but I don't know if it was here or TMC. I quickly scanned for one here and couldnt find one so here goes...

A valid point was made in the other thread I started yesterday that we should be making more of an effort getting exposure of MUDs to the 'outside world'. Because there are only so many current MUD players going around and it seems we all share those players through these sites, it would be interesting to firstly know what other games are currently doing to advertise/get their name out there above and beyond the MUD community and sites. In addition, it would be worth it to us all if we could brainstorm other ways we can get exposure as a whole.

I'll start with what we are doing for Medievia ...

-PC Gamer ads- We have been running a small ad in the back of PG Gamer since last October. It has brought many players to our game but more than that it has put the name 'Medievia' in people's heads. Since the ads are there every month it is consistent exposure and each new month the ad is there more readers are intrigued and try. Of course we like the new players but part of our reasoning to do a 13 month run there is that more people now know that Medievia, and games like it, STILL EXIST. Most of the time I see MUDs mentioned on Slashdot, there is some phrasing like 'the MUD games of the 90s' and so forth.

-Google adwords- We have been subscribing to Google adwords for about a year now. We have played with the amount we spend for it and of course the more we want to spend the more exposure we get. However, I must confess, most of the keywords we are attached to deal with MUDs and RPGs. However, we do have keywords that involve chat, mmorpgs, online games, etc.

-Word of mouth campaigns- Every so often we urge our players to tell their acquaintences about our game. Word of mouth is STILL the #1 way we get players and the best way to retain players. So we offer incentives and such to our players for gaining us new players.

-Flyers/signs- We have flyers on our website to download and print as well as flyers that we send out to players to post. Players post them around campus, coffee shops, internet cafes, etc. This is not done as often as we'd like, but I'd thought I'd mention it.

If you are willing to share, what measures do you take to get exposure of your game to the world outside MUDs?

[WarHound]

I would probably advertise on Jolt or a similar gaming site/forum. Alot of traffic in a place like that, a good portion of them being gamers come for game discussion, forum roleplaying, or just to read a few random threads. A Mud Banner amid the clutter of the 'Servers for Rent' banners could do alot.

-WP

[the_logos]

Let's see, the methods we use are:

1. Word of mouth. I'm guessing we're no different from most MUDs here. Word of mouth is by far the most powerful player acquisition method. As long as you have a MUD people like, you can expect this to work with little effort on your part. Like Medievia, we have flyers and whatnot that people can download and post in internet cafes, military bases, schools, etc.

2. Internet advertising. We experiment with advertising on various sites and have advertised on everything from comics sites like PvPOnline, Nuklearpower.com, Ctrl+Alt+Del to game aggregation sites like . Our next campaign is going to target WoW players on sites like The key here is to try to offer them something that they aren't getting on WoW. Better roleplaying, political systems, the ability to affect the world via admin-run worldwide plots, etc.

3. Press releases. We don't issue a ton of these, but when we do, IGN and other major games sites usually run them. I'm unsure how much traffic the press release pages get on those sites, but they do help keep our name out there among the more general gaming public, or at least the gaming media.

4. Participation in the wider games world via conferences, blogs, etc. This probably doesn't directly get us many players (though we do have some devs from companies like Valve playing, so I guess it got a few at least), but what it does, along with the press releases above, is ensure that the media is aware of us and that when they need a quote for a story or need/want to talk about digital asset sales or about text MUDs, we immediately come to mind. It's pretty hard to quantify these results though.

Overall, getting people who haven't played text MUDs before to play them is a bit of a tough sell. It's a shame, because I'm positive text MUDs have a lot to offer that people just aren't aware of. One of the major difficulties is trying to convey to people just what the advantages of text are. You can say things like "Increased depth" but that's pretty nebulous and doesn't really convey excitement, especially when many gamers would look at WoW as a really 'deep' game.

--matt

[Milawe]

[zombiedepot]

Hmm
I think advertising can help, but how do you get the attention of the common gamer? It all breaks down to what your friends are playing, and everyone seem to be playing World of Warcraft and the big name MMORPGs.

The masses seem to be generally ignorant about the existence of MUDs. And when bringing it up to some of the diehard MMORPG fans, I either get a "huh? what's that?" or "I don't like those text webpage games" as a reply.

These days I introduce it as "a quicker way to play D&D" and it goes into people's heads better than going into my usual spiel about the dawn of MUDs, and then them finding out to their disappointment, they have to read it.

A few of my friends and I are working on a MUD, and the biggest concern for us is that there aren't many MUD-less MUDders out there. And only a handful of newbies anymore it seems. We've already lost a couple staff members and play testers to WoW.

[Baram]

I'd say the real trick is, don't tell them it's text until they really seem interested. Get them with the level of roleplay, depth, customization, etc. What ever it is your mud does best, explain that feature via your ads(or attempt to) then if you have a nice looking website that will further their want to try it out. When they do(a nice java client helps, IRE has a REALLY nice looking one), they'll see it's text but there's a good chance they'll try it just because you got them interested. If your newbie introduction is a good one, you might just keep them.

[nass]

Great topic guys. Lessee, advertising to non mudders.

I'm very big on search engines - I've always made it a point to rank as high as possible for every "wheel of time" related search on every search engine that I can manage. This is ongoing and I do a lot of work to this end.

We also used to do a lot of banner ad stuff with rpghost and other banner networks. They still work, but with banner blocking software they're just not as effective. Also, when I tried a few a few month back I found some really tasteless stuff on these networks now so I didn't really want to continue.

I've always emailed editors of major gaming websites to feature us, and I find that the fact that we're actually 100% free, ie an altruistic exercise (because we can) helps us a lot with that. We've had some notable successes that way.

There's the usual directory submission stuff but that doesn't really help that much nowadays. ODP etc are dead in terms of traffic as far as I can tell. We've also tried some other offline things like miniposters, cards in libraries etc but they're not effective.

I have to say I kinda disagree about mentioning it's text last. I find that if you spend a lot of time and effort trying to persuade potential players to play your RPG without telling them its text you're wasting a lot because most walk away once they realise.

[Crystal]

It would be nice if there was a way to target the television audience, but there is not. At least not until someone has the financial ability to create a commercial of some sort. I always thought if I ever made it big in music that I'd do something like that, but I most likely won't.

Another pretty hefty target would be the blogging audience. Since it's become more "chic" to have blogs on political matters, personal journals, etc, you could try targetting that instead. I don't have any suggestions on that specifically, but it's a thought anyway. Bloggers already spend a good deal of time online, so they would probably be more receptive.

I've spoken about my MUD on my own personal journal before, and have a small following of people that have never played MUDs before interested in trying it out when it opens.

[the_logos]

TV is obviously incredibly powerful given its reach and inherently "rich media" format. TechTV/G4 did a minute and a half segment about Achaea a couple years ago and it was absolutely flooded with newbies for the next few days, to the tune of over 1000 newbies/day on a couple days.

In the end, Achaea directly garnered 66 customers from that 90 second tv spot that ran probably only 3 times, and those customers have spent a total of somewhere around $25,000 so far. The real impact of the TechTV spot is likely somewhat significantly higher since word of mouth is so powerful and acts as a multiplier for all other forms of advertising.

Unfortunately, I'm not really sure how to extrapolate the success of the TechTV/G4 spot (which was a review of Achaea, not a commercial paid for by us or whatnot) to a tv commercial. There are no doubt differences of some sort between a commercial and a review, but how big those differences are (and whether the review actually is more valuable than the commercial, wihch seems likely but that's purely a guess), I dunno. I also haven't really looked into what it costs to produce a decent tv spot (not cheap though I'm sure) and to then buy the airtime.

Overall, despite the review's success for Achaea, my gut is that a tv commercial is probably not going to be economically feasible unless you're just trying to build market share. I think it's worth considering that even the big graphical MMOs don't do a lot of tv advertising, at least on the tv channels I watch (well, maybe they do in Asia, I don't know).

--matt

[prof1515]

[DonathinFrye]

With commercials, the things to consider are backdoors and budgeting tricks. Indisputably, commercials are the most effective way to gain new players and spread public awareness of a MUD/MMORPG. Suggestions I would have to companies with the money/resources to go this route;


- Search your playerbase for the following;
Film Students, People who have studied Film and have some professional experience, Writers, Funny/Creative People, ACTORS, CG/Computer Artists/Programers, and Techies.

Get a group together that has the skill/ability to write, create, and perform an eye-turning or at least interesting commercial that will speak to mostly a target audience between the ages 15-30. Fund them enough to let them rent whatever equipment they can't scavenger, and give them plenty of booze. Then let them make a commercial.

You can put this commercial online and link to it via forums, online advertising, and your website. As far as national t.v. goes... consider the following;

In America, there are large areas that more MUD/MMORPG players live in than other areas. California and Texas are both huge gaming areas. There are others as well - do some research. Then dish out the money to advertise in a local "test area" - see howmany new players that gets you. Estimate cost efficiency based on the gaming population density there, and then crunch some numbers and start running ads on local (NBC, ABC, CBS, and other) stations since they charge less money for more air-time. Also, as most gamers in the targetted age-group tend to be late night television watchers also, make use of those cheap, late night television ad-slots also. They could be an easy gold mine.

If this seems to be yielding a desirable number of new paying customers, consider seeing if the Sci-Fi channel would be able ot strike you a deal with air-time (I have heard that they are very approachable, helpful, and relatively cheap for a cable station). Do a test run, see what the desired affect is, draw your marketing plan and continue. If you are a commercial MUD, then it is just a matter of investment - however, the national recognition and playerbase swell could totally take even the largest MUD to the next level.

In a market where the other immediate (text rpgs in this case) competition has no television advertising, it does not take much advertising to yield a large return.

[Jazuela]

No need to pay for advertising at all. MUDding is such a "niche group" thing that it would be a fringe interest to non-mudders. Write up an article about mudding in general, use some of your favorite games as references, and submit it to your weekly newspaper. The dailies probably wouldn't bite, but the "alternate" weeklies might jump at a "fluff piece" about the subculture that is MUD.

In fact, maybe I'll write something for the Advocate. If they like it, they'll pay ME to publish it.

[ScourgeX]

That's interesting, wonder why that is? I'd say my MUD has more players from Texas than any other location.

[the_logos]

It's because California and Texas have the highest populations of any US states.
--matt

[aegora]

[ScourgeX]

[DonathinFrye]

It also has to do with cost of living, average income, and a slower philosophy/life-pace than the east coast and other areas. All combinations of society/economics there support and encourage a more internet connected life-style than other places. A good example of this, out of the states, is the european country Estonia.

Estonia is a huge gaming country, including a large text-mud playing community, despite their very small country size. Lots of things, sociologically, go into making an area more internet/gaming/MUD prone. You could literally write books on it.

[the_logos]

Meaning what exactly? Higher cost of living = lower or greater MUDing likelihood? Higher average income = lower or greater MUDing likelihood? Can you point to some sort of correlating data?

The reason I ask is because if it's correlated to high income and low cost of living, then California would suffer in comparison. Texas has a reasonably low cost of living (compared to California, at least). The states with the highest per-capita incomes are mainly east coast, and Texas is in the bottom half of the states in terms of average income. There's a huge difference in terms of cost of living and per capita income between California and Texas. MUDing is unlikely to be correlated to low-income too, as then we'd see a lot more deep south players.

The problem is a total lack of reliable data on MUD players. Really, the only person I'm aware of who is doing long-ish term studies with any credibility on the demographics/ethnographics of MUD players is Nick Yee at PARC, but his work isn't without some problems, particularly in the method he uses to gather data (opt-in studies).

--matt

[DonathinFrye]

The trend, as I insinuated in my post, goes beyond just MUDs - and there are entire books, classes, and professionals who deal with the sociological trends of the Internet; I know from personal, collegic study of the subject. Again, I'll refer to my entire post; combinations of per-capita income, costs of living, pace-of-life, public acceptance of internet cult interest, game-design studio locations, etc etc etc etc ETC go into what causes trends in high populations of internet-society users in a given geographical area.

Anyways, the reasons for high density is not as important to the topic of the post as the fact that high density locations are perfect geographical Red Xs for cheap, local, television advertising.

[Threshold]

What kind of success have you seen from this - in particular compared to the cost of the ad? I've seen your ad numerous times in PC Gamer (since I subscribe), and I've always wondered how you all felt about its return.