Pew Pew Laser Blog

Code. Glass art. Games. Baking. Cats. From Seattle, Washington and various sundry satellite locations.

Blogs about marketing

Games I've Beat.

1.15.2018

Gender-based marketing is lazy and video game marketing has been lying to you. Here is a list of video games that I have beat. Where "beat" means variously beat the final boss, won all races or levels, or completed the story, as appropriate for the genre.

Online Marketing Protips.

3.27.2014

I dug up some old thoughts about online marketing.

Important Life Lessons.

7.23.2013
  1. "Free information" or "Free inspection" means "Let me sell you something".
  2. If you have to pay some money to "retrieve" something, it's probably a scam.
  3. A casino will never offer you a deal to increase your odds of winning. Proposed changes always favor the proposing party.

Used Video Games.

2.27.2013

For my first decade as a video gamer, the only game we owned was the cartridge that was bundled with the NES. When we had visitation with the NES, we would rent different cartridges from the local VHS rental store. I had to rent on 3 subsequent weekends (playing instead of sleeping, and hoping no other renters deleted my save) to beat it the first time.

These days, I buy both used and new video games, though the vast majority of my purchases are new. When I'm done with a game, I give it to a friend, or sell it to an individual or company. Thus, even though I'm done with it, the game continues to contribute to society rather than adding to my domestic clutter or decomposing in a landfill.

There is some question as to whether the next generation of game consoles will enable this behavior. The poor poor game makers say that the used market prevents them from selling games, and that without up-sell tactics like pre-planned (paid) DLC and code-locked content, they'll go out of business.

I say BS to all of this moral high ground foolishness. Game makers and publishers, it's your job to figure how to manufacture and market your game in a way that benefits your company. It's your job to make a game so good that gamers cannot wait to play it; to include compelling enough on-line or social content to drive early adoption. The opportunity for independent and low-cost distribution has never been higher.

Freemium Games.

9.6.2012

Wired's Game|Life published a great article on freemium games - games which are free to download and play (mostly on mobile phones), but have in-game bonuses that the player may buy. Some games take the time honored website model of in-content-advertising to the extreme by:

selling eyeballs to advertisers instead of selling games to gamers.

For my money (or eyeballs, if you will), here are some key properties of a successful free-to-play experience:

Some games that have created a successful FtP model include (on iOS), on Facebook, on iOS or Facebook, and League of Legends on Windows.

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