Well besides rule of handshake and word of mouth, my division isn't really known by the rest of the company... which is good in the fact that we normally work on upper end telecommunications systems for the DoD and I actually find working in the civilian area of installation to be a bit tedious with permits and extra paperwork.

Basically I dunno about adds in gaming magazines anymore. I guess I believe that if folks are actually reading CGW and others that they probably own a computer and are coming here once they see the website on the page to learn more. I know thats how I found GC1 in a way, saw the box, looked up the website, than went back and bought the game. Website for GalCiv again for getting to GC2.

So in a way the product sold itself to me, based on information I found online but seen offline first.

In conclusion, the only time I read computer magazines anymore is if one of the kits are in need of a new retired military ID card and if I am behind a huge line in the doctors office. So yes, I would look at gaming adds, but are those two or three times a year for two or three hours I look worth what your paying... for that matter is it worth the time having your accountants work it into your budget and make sure your tax credits are getting back to you?

I did like the spread you showed us all though online.

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

Are your ads targetted to a different web address or do they in some way help you know for sure that the ads are driving traffic to your products? If so, then good, if not, then you may just be doing as you said - supporting those that may have helped support you.

I think advertising in magazines is a good thing, as it does help generate buzz and demand for your product among people that might not find you otherwise, but I hope you are set up to verify that you're getting your money's worth from your marketing dollars.

Best of luck either way!

Commercial Reality is they published the article because they thought it would be of interest to their readers - and therefore add to the drive to boost their magazine circulation.... I doubt integrity came into it.

The Marketing industry has several companies/institutions that make a living generating projected income from advertising in various sources - kind of a black art, especially when you factor in self-interest in terms of companies hosting the advertising wanting to be seen in a good light.

I would search around for a Marketing Pro and take it from there - given that the guy you end up with is not a Shark himself For example the generally accepted hit rate on a totally cold-call campaign on something not in the news is 0.5%. Doesnt seem a lot, but if the cold-call campaign generates - say - 500 hits from 100,000 cold calls on the phone - it can be well worth while depending on the base cost of the offered item/service and the charges made by the CallCentre. A Marketing Pro would give you the best advertising routes and indicative costs/likely success. The latter they get from researching the results of various ad campaigns from customer feedback.

I know the caution that some have over so called Consultants, but in the Marketing world there is no substitute for quality advice. The guy should be able to give you Reference Sites for work done that you can ring and check up on etc

A Flat rate for work is common - but you should negotiate a flexible contract eg if the guy wants $5000, offer him $4000 up front, then the rest by graduated scale based on the campaign results, capped at - say - 150% of his original quoted rate. Incentivise to get them to focus on you, They love flat rate work that they can use as a fill in .....

Regards
Zy

Sorry double post -...

Another suggestion is Hire a dedicated Marketing Manager. Say $50K salary plus incentives, that would be circa $120K management cost over the FY. Sounds a lot of additional overhead, but as you pointed out $20K for a double spread is a lot, dont take much to recoup the extra manpower overhead from preventing dud campaigns ... let alone generating a successful campaign in house without using Consultants (who in reality will come closer to $50K plus campaign costs not the example I gave above....)

Regards
Zy

Avatar Brad Wardell : "Does that $20,000 two-page spread in a game magazine generate 2X in sales of the game?"

Reply : $20 000 ?! Your excellent game does not require a two-page spread! I "feel" that it is a waste of money. One page in the 3 major PC-games mags should be enough.

P.S. Even though the following observation is off-topic, I would suggest that you charge a small fee for the updates which will follow 1.2 (before the release of the expansion). From 1.0 to 1.2, your team will have done more than enough unpaid work (such as during the weekends). Any customer who has updated the game to 1.1 or 1.2 will have had enough return on his original investment (when he purchased the game). GC2 will be in top shape with version 1.2, before the expansion arrives. Consequently, version 1.3 (and other following updates) should be considered super-gravy and should be financed by those customers who really want more. But since I am new to this forum, I am perhaps suggesting something that has already been discussed (and rejected) on the forum and within the Stardock adhocracy.

I'm not sure an advert in a magazine would make me buy a game, but i've been playing for ages. But what it does do is Highlight the fact that the game exists. I would then look for reviews on the game from organisations such as gamespot and even IGN if I got desperate enough. I used to like gamesdomain, but they got yahoo'd. If the review was good then I will consider purchasing.

I wouldn't buy a game based solely on a magazine review though. I'm loosing my respect for computer magazines as a whole, they are too prone to promote what I consider to be weak games that have originated from the mega publishers. Even my beloved Edge have lost their love of PC games. It was only after reading your dev journal post regarding reviews that I learned about independent reviewers and the respect they hold, but if you can consider me as a typical gamer, This meant nothing to me as all I was interested in was the blurb, the guy who wrote the piece is just someone who works for the magazine. If the magazine is disregarded then so is the reviewer. But thats my opinion.

I think it would be a good idea for you to do a spread in a high profile magazine because more people will know GC2
exists. But Its gotta be eyecatching. The best one I've ever seen had to be the one for I-war or Independence war. Fantastic. grabbed my attention and even though its a glorified flight sim with guns and set in space, I bought it on the strength of some of the reviews I read.

later

Pay for patch? No one else in the industry does that. Some vertical products sell a "support" package that includes customer support and or patches (like Oracle, etc). But, you don't find this in the Game Industry.

I'm an old timer. Been using DOS since 2.0. I used Wordstar, Lotus Symphony, dBase II, etc. I have observed the industry for a very long time. I think that magazine adverstising is much less effective than web advertising. I learned about GC2 from Gamespot. That "Be the first to download the demo" idea was brilliant. Gamespot and similar websites are free. Free=more people see it. Computer Game World is not free. Much fewer people see their ads. Game enthusiasts like myself visit the sites between tasks at work or at home. I visit the sites about 100 times more often than I buy a magazine. This is the Digital Age. Printed Media, whether it be news or otherwise, is dropping in subscribership like theres no tomorrow. IF I ran a software company, I might put one ad in the most read game magazine, and then focus the remaining 90 percent of my advertising budget into Web ads.

It's no secret that advertising and branding more specifically has been hogging up all the ' value-added' in more recent decades (just look at the shifting trend on the rapid increase in financial capital spent on advertising and the overwhelming reluctance to invest in anything resembling a factory, and again the rise of contracting, sub-contracting and 'home work') since companies started tagging onto the Nike model and advertising strategy (the removal of the product from the advertisement). There is no question in my mind the importance of branding, and how it affords companies 'strategy'.

But the effectiveness of a single advert, i cant be certain. It partly depends on the advert itself and how well its positioned to its target market. One thing is certain however advertising has been passed off as a cure-all.


I would definetly recommend you reading The Consumerist Manifesto by Martin P Davidson (1992)

Does advertising work? Maybe yes to an extent for the younger players, like age 12-20. The problem with advertising is that it is there to sell something (just the good info). I beleive consumers want to know the good and bad info before they buy.

My opinion is in 2 parts:

1) The Present - Now, I am too skeptical about advertising to take any ad for face value. No magazine ad will ever make me by a game because I think there are politics involved with who gets good ratings and so on. How did I find GC2? I was in the mood to play a good space sim and did an online search, I ran across many games, GC2 was one of them. Each time I did further searches about a certain game review, looking for "non-official" opinions of the game. I liked what I saw. Then I bought it.

2) The Past - Gone are the times when I can pick up a box from the shelf and read it to know if I'll like it. To me, there have been waves of crap games in the past 10 years or so. Meaning what is on the box may be what the game is about and some of the content, but I have been burned too many times, paying $50.00 for a game that has a bunch of stuff but isnt playable because of bugs, poor design, hardware conflicts, etc... Of course the internet now has much more information than it did a decade ago and I think it is or will become an important part of cutting through advertisement BS.

An ad needs only to be big enough to be noticable. A well done stand out 1 page could work as well as a two page, especially on subsequent insertions.

Your latest two page ad in CGW did get the point across, and I thought they were well done.

Ads will tell new potential users that the game exists and allows for easier sales of the product from people that are predisposed to buy your product ( ie for Galciv2, SF strategy gamers, MOO2 lovers etc,) that your game even exists.

Without advertising, for exaample in CGW, some of their subscription and magaazine buyers are strategy gamers according to their surveys. Without at least one ad, some of those easy sales would not know you exist.

Advertising acts as a bought channel. It counteracts your lack of distribution channel strength by pushing demand from theh consumer up and gets those interested consumers to search you out in retail stores or on your web site.

And advertising acts as a proxy for word of mouth and leverages your positive reviews to more people.

Advertising basically gets you in the decision set for some buyers that otherwise wouldn't consider your product.

How much is enough? Who knows but if increasing advertisng increases sales, probably a agood idea to spend more, If deceasing advertising corresponds to decreasing sales, then it might be worth a try to increase it again to see if it increases again. But there is a risk that after a decline you are throwing good money after bad.

General princple is that if things are going well, don't decrease advertising, considering increasing it. Don't mess with success, wait until sales cool to consider cutting back.

Old advertising adage even to successful companies is that ‘50% of my advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half’. That may be changing eventually, but the moral is if your sales are working, some of your advertisng is probably working also.

Also, a self selection bias will appear on this forum for internet savvy heavy users. A lot of you store sales may not be forum posters and the posters here may not be a representative sample of those people that responded to your advertising.

Human nature tends to have people not want to admit they responded to an ad, because they don’t want to admit they were manipulated. In research studies word of mouth is overstated and recall due to advertising is almost always understated.

Advertising also may get people interested in the game where they will check out the reviews, search the web, ask friends etc. With the advertising spark they may never had heard of you or considered your product purchase. If you ask some of those people why they point or how they heard of you, some if not most may site the review as the reason, even though they may not have read the review without the ad.

The real advertising question is not whether advertsing works but what advertising works better than others and is cost effective in increasing or sustaing sales.

IMHO

The update fee idea really goes against the spirt of what they're trying to sell with this game. I'd never buy another Stardock game if they implemented a 'pay for patch' system. [...] Pay for patch? No one else in the industry does that.

Perhaps I was not clear and specific enough in my previous post. I totally agree with both of you that "patches" to fix bugs and technical problems should remain free : of course!

I was refering rather to "upgrades", such as pertaining to enhanced features.

If you have read all of Brad Wardell's recent posts, you must realize that he and some members of his GC2 team have been working for free "beyond the call of duty". For example, just taking the time to regularly read the forum posts and taking the trouble to reply are time-consuming, and Mr Wardell has stated that he was tinkering with the A.I. code during the weekend!

That's all very nice, but there is a point where grateful gamers should step up and shoulder part of the burden.

Summer is coming : do we expect that Brad Wardell and his team will continue to use up their leisure time to produce updates 1.3, 1.4, 1.5?

My suggestion is NOT that consumers should pay for technical "patches", of course, but rather, that very hungry (and very grateful) gamers should finance feature "upgrades" which go "beyond the call of duty" for the Stardock b-u-s-i-n-e-s-s. I hear some guys holler that they want a more competitive A.I. on the higher levels of difficulty : fine --- why not finance it?

For example. What is $4.95 worth today? Let's suppose that an OPTIONAL "1.33" upgrade would cost 5 bucks : what would be the big drama with that? A single evening at the movies, with popcorn and cola, costs even more!

I say : a $5 upgrade, not a "patch" -- which, of course, should remain free.

I am just trying to float a speculative balloon. I believe that those of us who have purchased GC2 and have updated it to 1.11 have already been blessed with a great deal. Why not, then, support the leading members of the GC2 team instead of exxxpecting that they should continue to work for free during the summer, just for the sake of "passion"?

I am new to this forum. I have no connection whatsoever with Stardock. (To the point that I write "Mr Wardell" instead of the more casual and chummy "Brad" or "Frogboy".) But possibly, as I have implied in my previous post, Stardock has already killed any idea of offering updates at a cost because "The update fee idea really goes against the spirt of what they're trying to sell with this game."

Well, then, here is what I am going to do : I will mail a $5 check to Stardock for all updates beyond 1.11 (starting with 1.2), up to the release of the expansion. Those of you who exxxpect more free upgrades : well, you're in luck, because the leading members of the GC2 will most probably continue to satisfy you for free --- because of their "passion".

Stardock is not Blizzard.