Marketing?

[Amob_M_S]

First of all, thanks to Slitherine for making some really great games- realistic, accessible, detailed, historically accurate, and tons of other great features. CoW in particular has great atmosphere, captures the chaotic, almost-lawless attitude of ancient Mesopotamia very well. It is also one of the only games covering this time period. It's easily moddable too, so players can customize to their hearts' content. My question is, why are there so few people who have ever heard of this game, or Legion, or Spartan, or Gates of Troy?

Really, this isn't harsh criticism, but I just think that Slitherine has some great products, but the only reason I ever heard of them was because a local used book store that also carries cheap, obscure games had a copy of CoW that looked really cool. Your products remind me a lot of Paradox Entertainment's Europa Universalis series (which contains games between Roman and Cold War times), but those games can be seen on store shelves nearly anywhere, while Slitherine products (excepting the History Channel-sponsored games) are almost unknown.

My suggestion (I'm no marketing expert, though) would be to really put Legion 2 (when its close to release, that is) out there for everyone to see. Submit it for review to all the different game sites, especially strategy-game sites. If you get people interested in Legion 2, they may buy some older products, too. Paradox recently did a promotional stunt, to promote the digital download of EU3, they released EU1 for digital download at just $1. Similarly, before Hidden and Dangerous 2 came out, the original was released as freeware. This seems to work- both games were really good, and with the sequels promising to be even better, people were quite interested in buying the new products too.

Again, I don't want to seem harsh here. I just see a lot of potential in Slitherine, but not a lot of publicity.

[IainMcNeil]

Thanks - Paradox published Legion & CoW so if the marketing was poor you should talk to them

If you have a look CoW was reviews on all the major gaming sites as are the other games, but unless you spend a fortune on marketing the reviews tend to be hidden away and not always very flattering!

[Amob_M_S]

Yeah, that's the gaming industry for you today. You either have a ton of money, because you don't take any risks with innovative gaming but go for the well-established sellers (EA, Ubisoft- and sadly, Bethesda and Creative Assembly, too) and can afford to buy a ton of publicity, or you take risks, make good but nonconventional games that because they are different don't sell so well, then don't make enough money to market your product and thus even the little publicity you do get is overshadowed. Ah, well.

Anyways, those were just my thoughts, that its really a shame to see really good games that nobody knows about.

[mikul82]

I think this is a big problem with alot of "niche" games out there, as wargames and flight sims both seem to have the same problem. If it weren't for Matrixgames, I'd have never even heard of Slitherine or it's games- I now own Chariots and Gates of Troy and love both, planning to get Spartan eventually and cannot wait for Legion II! The same really goes for flight sims now as well- if not for simhq.com, I wouldn't have a clue what's on the horizon as these just (like wargames) aren't covered by most other pc game media any more.

The bad part is, I have no idea how to get around it either. The "mainstream" game media industry is quite obviously giving games higher scores in exchange for advertising income, bribes, etc- Just look at the enormously high ratings of everything from Oblivion (little to no mention of even the obviously built for an Xbox controller horrible interface) to Medieval II- neither was really a BAD game, but both had glaring bugs out of the box, and in many opinions, gameplay flaws as well, which simply weren't ever mentioned in the near-perfect reviews of these games. PC Gamer even called Medieval II's strategy portion "Better than Civ 4" , when the AI opponent could truly make a monkey playing against it look like Alexander the Great- The Civ 4 AI isn't perfect but can at least put up a fight! I don't think there is any real way for independent creators of high-quality games such as Slitherine to compete with the money involved in "buying" high review scores/recognition. It would be like someone who actually cared about the country's population and who didn't spend the average citizen's yearly salary on their haircuts alone trying to run for a high level political office in the US.

I think the best way to get the recognition out there really is going to be put in the hands of us fans of such companies- Start putting the slitherine website in your signature in other forums maybe, burning CDs of Slitherine game demos and giving them out to friends, and other types of "referral" advertising that won't cost the game companies any money or time.

I've noticed that most of the PC games released in the last several that I've really fallen in love with have simply never been heard of by too many other people who don't frequent game forums, sites, or etc.