Hi im a newbie My first post. I have been cruising the site for a few days and it is very informative. Please excuse me as i am not a dedicated gamer just someone that has seen an oportunity I have commisioned a MMORPG. It has taken 8 months and tens of thousands of dollars so far with 2 programmers working full time. Its is due to be ready in beta form in the next 3 months and im starting to get some ideas together for when it does. The game is browser based and very similar to Runescape, playing in a virtual world click and move. Each user is able to create a custom avatar and chat amoungst friends and the game features will include all the magic and mystery you would have found in the early days of Runescape with many minigame adventures along the way. Once complete i have a budget for continual updates and changes and for marketing. I would just like to hear anybodys experience or advice on going about marketing this kind of game. I realsie that subscription will be difficult at first until a solid user based is built but im concerned when/how to make that transition to having people pay. Sorry but i do not want to give out the URL yet as i have been warned not to hype an unfinished product. I look foward to hearing from anyone.
many MMORPGs advertise on Intergi.com, cpmstar.com, and AdToll.com. The first 2 are gaming ad networks and AdToll just has a lot of gaming sites using them.
With that kind of budget I hope that your new site will become as sucessful as the Gower brothers did with RuneScape. Goodluck!
A LOT of successful online games use some type of viral marketing, like making some really cool short videos with screenshots/animation, then distribute them through google video, youtube, etc. If you can think of a way to create some mystery or intrigue surrounding what the video is about, you can create a good bit of buzz. For advertising it, AdSense is a must. AdToll is also a good place for gaming advertisements. Best of luck!
Check out TIBIA... What they do is amazing... Quality free gameplay... Yet 50,000 + pay $7 a month for "extra benefits" that really only matter until you are a high level... Get people completely involved with the game, then let them have "premium areas" "premium spells" I have a lot of ideas, you can pm if you would like... I am also great at web developing, and marketing...
Some excellent points all round, thankyou to everyone so far. Im convinced Viral is the way foward due its low cost long term effect. The budget for the game is around £25,000 ($50,000) with an ongoing monthly budget of £1000 ($2000) for hosting, mods and marketing. I realise in perspective to the succesful games out there my budget is tiny but with the time and effort and usefull advice I hope to acheive success. I will be watching this thread religiously and will definately be contacting those who dont mind giving some advice. Many thanks
You need to make sure that your game has something that the other popular games don't have or don't do well. Also to get a huge number of signups and active players what you could do is is offer rewards and feature the winners on your actual site. You can have a spacial weapon, spell, or area in the game that only someone that has one the award can have access to.
Another thing you might want to include is the ability to trade for real money. It might sound audacious but you can have it integrated into your mmorpg bu others. Sony just announced they are going to switch to one yesterday, its called Live Gamer Exchange. I think they have a sliding scale for payments - ie. they take 5% you get 5% and the seller gets the rest minus a small listing fee. just my 2 coppers.
Currently working on this kind of feature already. Players must complete tasks to unlock other areas of the game, the deeper they go the more benifits they have along the way. I have always wanted to keep a community feel to the game, giving players the chance to either work together or alone and having a leaderboard style feature where you can monitor your competitors. As the game gets more indepth so will the features on offer. Players can either buy say a teleporter for $5.00 for 10 teleports or earn it depending where in the game they have discovered the feature.