I know a thing or two about marketing- it’s part of my job in many ways. I often write advertising copy, help with social media marketing and article marketing and run online advertising campaigns for clients. This experience in marketing allows me to understand one common problem with many MMORPGs today- they lack the proper marketing to get noticed by the masses.
Blizzard has the resources and the funds for a huge marketing campaign. They have ads everywhere you look, often right under our noses when we don’t even realize it. The problem is that most developers just don’t have the resources to compete, especially with a giant like Blizzard in the MMORPG world.
But EA is preparing to carpet bomb you with SWTOR ads, as Dual Shockers explains:
Thanks to a transcript of the Q&A Session held during the conference we can get a little more insight on what EA is planning to turn the marketing war in its favor.
The first step is the most obvious: a major mass-market network television campaign. You may have seen some TV commercials of SWTOR style=”mso-bidi-font-style: normal;”>, but you’re most probably going to see a lot more from now on.
The second stage of the assault will be a major use of the synergy with Lucas. The 3D re-release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace will hit the theaters on the 10th, and EA is going to play heavily on the cross promotion between the movie and the game.
Finally they’re going to use their cross-platform gaming community Nucleus, Origin and their combined hundreds of million users in order to get the word out even more and “aggregate the eyeballs, minds and wallets of gamers around the globe”.
This sounds like a pretty good plan to me. Already the buzz is out about SWTOR. People who don’t even play games are talking about it and asking about it. If they can keep this buzz up, they will continue to bring in the big numbers of subscribers that they have right now. It’s a great plan but will they pull it off?
Only time will tell for sure.
