Emergent Future

Road to War and Marketing

Written by Sean

Thursday, 21 August 2008

Last Updated ( Thursday, 21 August 2008 )

 

Well, the last few days have been a bit busy as I'm getting ready for a move, but I wanted to take a moment to discuss something interesting I found on the old Internets that was released by Mythic, the people developing Warhammer Online. That would be the Road to War website. Now, to put it lightly, I'm interested in game communities. As an extension to that, I'm also rather interested in game marketing. Now, while I am intending on picking up Warhammer Online when it releases already, it isn't its attachment to the game that draws my attention, but rather Road to War's marketing potential that intersts me. Let us take a look at the various reasons why this website is an amazing marketing tool: First off, the front page is a giant map. It isn't' a map of all the regions that people can play WAR in (which is silly, but likely because there is a different distributer in Europe), but anyone is able to sign up to the site. Not to mention that, but when you sign up, you add yourself to the map. That map is covered in those little dots too, which shows little doubt that there is a huge number of people interested in Warhammer Online - it flaunts the popularity of the game. Awesome. Second is that it is a very simple game: gain gold - and thus victory points - for your realm to take over territories on the map to win battles. How do you get gold? By visiting the site on a daily basis and voting in the daily poll - which keeps you in touch with WAR and keeps it in your mind. Great idea. Not only that, but you also get huge amounts of gold for recruiting new people, giving the players incentives to recruit even more people to be interested in Warhammer Online. But no, that's not where they are stopping: Mythic is creating embeddable content for websites. If you own a website, you can place this content on your site, and every time someone interacts with it, you gain gold - incentive to have it on your site. Whenever someone interacts with it, they also gain gold, which gives them incentive to actively use it and seek it out - which draws people to websites related to Warhammer online. It also leaves little embedded content on the internet that random people can stumble across and use to learn about Warhammer Online. They're also getting a Facebook widget for much the same reason. People who are marketing games: seriously. Look at this. Mythic has a history of being ahead of the game as far as using the internet to their advantage (take the Camelot Herald at Dark Age's launch), and this is another example of it, just in a different area. Users' Comments (0) Add your comment

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