[MUD-Dev] Marketing Niche Online Games

[Christopher Allen]

As a niche online game publisher, it has not been economical for us
to buy advertising for our games in traditional media, and even web
advertising has not been that productive except at a very limited
number of sites, such as <http://www.rpg.net>. So Skotos has been
experimenting with alternative ways to reach out to the market.

Two months ago we released a comic book based on our first game,
Castle Marrach, at "Awakenings" <http://awakenings.marrach.com/> --
it is available for online viewing, as well as in PDF and available
for Print on Demand via Café Press. Already we have a number of
people creating fun derivative works based on the comic, which fits
perfectly into the storytelling themes in Castle Marrach.

Last month, we released the cooperative board game "Arkham Horror"
<http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/arkhamhorror.html>, which we
licensed from the original 1980s author, cleaned up, and sold it to
noted board and card game publisher Fantasy Flight Games. In every
copy is information on our latest online game Lovecraft Country. The
release has gone extremely well, with great reviews at Board Game
Geek, and many game stores have already sold out and are selling
more. More importantly, we are getting new users for our games.

Today, we've released a new Cthulhu Mythos comic out called "Return
to Arkham" <http://www.lovecraftcountry.com/comic>, also for web,
pdf, or via Café Press. It's set in 1933, and includes beautiful,
moody black & white art depicting H.P. Lovecraft's town of
Arkham. In support of Lovecraft's belief in stories developed by
"Divers Hands" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_hands>, this
comic has also been released under a the Creative Commons license,
allowing anyone to create and release their own derivative works.

The author of both comics, Shannon Appelcline, has written in his
regular game design about why we've released our comic under
Creative Commons at <http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_170.phtml>.

Later this month we'll have a booth at GenCon, the largest paper
role-playing convention in the world. In the past, over 50 of our
players have come to GenCon to meet with us and they've been a huge
help in helping us run our booth and keeping our costs down. This
year we'll be giving out copies of our comics, player manuals,
posters and flyers to our attendees.  This makes GenCon far more
productive as a source of leads then any other conference we've
participated in.

I offer this information in spirit of cooperation -- all of us niche
online game publishers can learn from each other. What other novel
ways are there for a niche online game publisher to reach out to the
market? What do you think of what we've done to date? Do you have
any suggestions to share with us?

-- Christopher Allen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
.. <ChristopherA at skotos dot net>         2342 Shattuck Ave Ste 512 ..
.. www.skotos.net  www.rpg.net                Berkeley, CA 94704-1517 ..
.. office 510/649-4030         fax 510/849-1717     main 510-647-2760 ..
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