The New Wave of Marketing Part 2 March 22, 2011

I started an article last week where I talked about all the pros and cons of traditional marketing trends that have started over the past five years all to get a  player to buy your game as close to day one as possible, so you can sell your game as close to the release price as possible.

We discussed options like traditional media advertising, collector’s editions, and day one goodies for those who preorder.  They all have their pros and cons, and I talked about all that in my previous article.  Now I want to talk about some of the games that bucked the trends and were the most creative at promoting the release of their game to the gamers.

Now, a small disclaimer here.  A lot of the games that I’m going to talk about did in fact do a lot of the traditional advertising paths I discussed in the previous article, but they complemented this advertising with something truly unique (or unique at the time).

Without further ado, I decided to start this series with the mother of all groundbreaking games.

Doom (PC) – id Software was about to release the biggest game for the DOS platform which was going to revolutionize gaming as we knew it.  They had developed a first person shooter in a 3D environment, which would allow its user to use their modems or network cards to frag their friends.  It was the first true deathmatch game.  They needed to get the word out about this game and they weren’t going to do it through the traditional channels.  They were going to follow the shareware model that had been pioneered for gaming by men like Scott Miller at Apogee.

They first released the shareware on a system controlled by David Detta, who let them use it.  Within hours gamers swamped it to download the shareware, and Detta’s computer crashed. They also gave out free copies of the shareware to many game stores and told them to take the money from selling it and put it into marketing the full game’s release.

By the end of it, there were more copies of the Doom shareware on PCs than copies of Windows 95, and Microsoft had done a multi-million dollar traditional marketing push for that operating system.  These were the first inklings of the power of digital distribution and the strength of the online community in promoting something.

In the end, the first Doom was a massive financial success for id Software, and cemented their reputation as the most groundbreaking game development company of the time.

Keep checking back here for later parts, each detailing the most creative promotional methods in game development history.