Something I noticed today and put into proper perspective for the first time was the groupings of the various search terms people use to find the Alter Aeon web pages. The bulk of the search terms boil down to three categories - people looking specifically for Alter Aeon, people looking for muds and text rpgs, and people looking for blind-friendly games.
The first group, people looking specifically for Alter Aeon, I can only assume is almost entirely existing AA players. There's not likely to be much I can do to increase that without increasing the playerbase itself.
The other two groups are smallish categories of people that are likely to only be a niche market at best. These two categories are also smaller than the main category of existing players looking at the web site - that's no good at all! The obvious realization is that I need to push the game into other markets; my plan in the short term is to try to push into the MMO/MMORPG acronym space and see if I can't get listed with more conventional games. Having the client download will help tremendously with this, as it starts to look less and less like a MUD, at least on first glance.
I'll keep things posted here regarding how well it works.
Friday, December 26, 2008
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2 comments:
You may also want to appeal to specific OS markets? There have been several slashdot articles recently about how adventure/text games often have more depth and there are also articles appealing for more in depth games in general.
Linux users are starved of games, especially mmorpgs, WoW for instance is not available on linux ditros, and there is a growing wish for greater choice, you may even find that you get offers from the open source community to expand the mud into the graphical realm (whether that's desirable is another matter, but just imagine having a game that's accessible to blind players, via text commands, but also has the pretty graphics for sighted users, that would be a pretty appealing proposition)
Linux users will also be more likely to welcome games that use a text interface, having to use shell commands at least some of the time makes it likely that they won't have problems with the myriad of command options that are necessary for playing a mud, and that's not even thinking about the people that like playing obscure games out of a perverse wish to be 'niche'.
Either way, appealing to these areas could make a difference, big or small, its worth thinking about.
Ooh, hope you had a good christmas by the way :)
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