Wild ideas…Marketing by exclusion?
What if a game was marketed by exclusion? This nutty idea is inspired by services like Gmail, where they open up a thousand slots, let’s say, and then after those initial thousand slots have been filled you can only get access if one of those thousand invites you. I thought something crazy that might be interesting is to do this, but to also build in a reward system in the game that ties directly to the depth and breadth of the people you directly or indirectly have invited into the game. Maybe a social networking game of some sort.
on February 4th, 2005 at 11:06 pm
It’s a worthy idea - I had the same thought in 2000/2001 and was told by a few people (including *I think* Jeff T when I was in San Jose in 2002, but I’m not sure. Someone there at GDC though) that while intriguing, it wouldn’t work because you need to get that initial saturation quickly.
However, I’m not so sure about that. If a ‘creeping up the ramp’ business model works for you, then the ’snob appeal’ marketing approach should fit perfectly. Word-of-mouth, low capital outlay, etc.