A few months after release, and after we’d taken care of the initial fires, we sat down and took stock of where we were, and where we wanted to go. It’s always an interesting process doing this, because you get so wrapped up in what you’re building that you lose sight of the other possibilities. Once you’ve launched and have had some time to let things settle, you get a much wider perspective.

From that we created a plan that has been in the works for a while. It’s a combination of things we already had on the books (player governed ports, skirmish system, avatar combat revamp) and things that we’d talked about, but were finally in a position to start addressing (alternative advancement, social games in port, player announcements). It has a series of milestone posts, the first of which we’re coming to now, which is the marketing re-launch.

The idea of the launch campaign was to do an intensive blitz at a couple of key sites over a short period of time. Since then, there’s been effectively no marketing done. This was mainly because we’d identified a number of improvements we wanted in place before we started spending (SOE handled the launch marketing campaign, we’re doing this one directly). The last of those improvements (new tutorials) has arrived in 1.7, so that’s why we chose this time to launch the new campaign.

Unlike the previous marketing, this is not a onetime event where we hit intensively for a couple of weeks and then disappear. The idea of this is to do constant, pervasive marketing. And when I say “constant”, I don’t mean a week, a month, or a year. I mean FOREVER.

So here’s what we’re doing:

Advertising

We’re going to start by running ads on the Zam network, Google ad words, and Facebook. One of the great things about internet advertising is that you can directly measure what your money is buying you, and spend accordingly. Our plan is to try out various sites, see what kind of response we get, and continually refine where we spend our money.

That’s month one. Month two we’ll be advertising in different sites and building up a body of data. As part of that, I’d love to hear from our forum readers which sites they frequent so we can put them into the mix. And don’t feel constrained to just MMO sites or even gaming. One of the things we’ve found from surveying our customers is that they come from a wide variety of interests, and we want to make sure we’re getting our message out in front of those people.

Free Trials

The focus of the advertisements is to a) tell people about the game and b) get them to click on the ad to get a free trial. The free trial program allows someone to play the game for two weeks, at which time they have to purchase a box/download and a subscription to continue playing. Pirates is a very different taste than the normal MMO, and that can be a little scary to people. Free trials reduce that barrier to entry.

The Free Trials are also the start of our use of Station Launcher, the new launcher from SOE. We’ve been expecting it for quite some time, and it finally looks like it’s ready to go. We’ve had a number of problems with users having excessively long download times, and a lot of the affected users have had a much better experience with the new launcher. We’re also looking at other ways (such as changing the hosting) to give you a better download speed.

Web Site

The current web site has a number of problems with it, not least of which is the navigation. There’s a lot of information up there, but it’s difficult to find.

What we’ve done is to split the web site up into two different functions, the marketing web site for the new user, which is at www.piratesoftheburningsea.com, and the community web site for the current player, which is www.burningsea.com. The marketing site is updated with new information and new images, and does a better job of selling the game. Still, it’s a relatively minor update, while the community site has had a total overhaul. It has a new look, a new navigation model, and is a thousand times better than the old web site.

Starting

So when does all this start? Tuesday of next week. When does it end? Well, as I said before, it doesn’t. We’ll be rolling out the ads to more and more places, and expanding the scope of it. We’ve got a number of ads in production, and will be rotating them in and out to freshen up things. We’ll also be running ads for milestone releases talking about their new features.

Hiring

Speaking of those milestones, we’re staffing up in virtually every department. Growth is one of the reasons we moved into our new downtown offices, with lovely views and great restaurants! So if you know someone who’s kick ass and looking for a job in games, please forward them our way.

So as you can see, there’s been a LOT of work going on behind the scenes, and there’s more to come. See you on the twitter!