Take Blizzard's latest advertising venture, Azeroth Choppers:
It's an interesting effort to cross over into a market that may not have yet played WoW. At this point, the gaming community is probably saturated, with everyone at least having tried WoW.
Plus the existing mechano-hog/chopper in game are very popular mounts, especially since they were the first ones to allow passengers with the sidecar.
I think Blizzard should do more of this style of marketing. Some of it will work, some of it won't. But I think it shows some degree of inventiveness.
Heh, I think Blizzard should make an effort to sneak a Warcraft novel into the romance section of the bookstore. A full-out bodice-ripper. They could hire a recognized author in the romance genre. The trick would be to downplay the Warcraft part enough so that the bookstores don't automatically class the novel as fantasy. It would be interesting to see if they could pull that off.
Actually, to me, the most interesting part of Azeroth Choppers is that Blizzard is comfortable with giving a reward to only one faction. Or put another way, giving the reward to all players, but only allowing characters of one faction to use it. Both those formulations are the same thing, but they sound very different.
Okay, when you suggested a bodice ripper I had to check to see if it was April 1st. Failing that, I'm not so sure it'll work so well.
ReplyDeleteI mean, just googling Thrall and Jaina will conjure up waaaay too many NSFW pics and stories.
As for Azeroth Choppers, it's a nice idea, but I suspect their market research indicates that there's a lot of crossover between people who watch American Chopper and people who are lapsed subscribers. Given some of the discussions that took place in one of my old guilds, I really think this is the case.
Was there a part of this post that was cut out? The first line seems really out of place with the rest of the article.
ReplyDeleteThe first line was mostly a reaction to what I was seeing on Twitter and the internet, which was disdain for the entire concept and segment of society which likes such shows.
ReplyDeleteProbably should have made that clearer.
Rohan, maybe that's the MMO blogging community that doesn't like shows like American Chopper, but I know of quite a few MMO players who do.
ReplyDelete