Feedback Wanted / OOTP Marketing

[VARoadstter]

Originally Posted by JWay

They just got one! http://www.facebook.com/pages/Out-of...8957260?ref=nf

Great. Now you need to make a sticky thread for all the forum members who are on FB so they will join the club. That will spread the word fast, as I have almost 200 friends in my list alone.

Off to join now...

[knockahoma]

As I expressed in the radio example above, I tend to think Mal's correct in this instance.

Here's another thing, battists. A lot of folks in business will feel over-whelmed by the advertising avenues. They feel they just don't have the budget to do what they want. A common mistake is to take your advertising dollars and spread it out thinly over a number of places.They'll put a little here at this website and a little there at a phone-book, or five radio stations, and the newspaper, and the tv station. Which leads to the question:

Would you rather convince? 100% of the people 10% of the way to buy your product, or 10% of the people 100% of the way?

I don't know what you mean by having a limited advertising budget. $500, or $10,000? But, I think you guys have a pretty nice product and you should spend advertising dollars. There are good values out there.

Sure. Use free services to get the word out. So, definitely, use Facebook and Twitter. But, I really think you have a class product that advertising can elevate.

An advertising budget can grow using the same creative powers you use on the game.

(If you think I'm a huge advocate of advertising, you're right. But, I do put my money where my mouth is, too. . And I think you guys have some wonderful potential.

[rem]

It shouldn't be too difficult to send a mass invite for twitter and facebook to every e-mail address that regiesterd for this forum, bought the game or signed up for the newsletter. Don't just send an e-mail that says, "Check out our feed and page!" but do it right so that the invite comes from those social networking sites.

Poor MySpace - first time it's been mentioned in this thread.

[endgame]

Well, this is an unusual site. Out of the Park 6.11 (demo) is available there, but difficult to actually find the download link. It's on this page: http://www.topshareware.com/nature-p...ownloads/1.htm

However, any site that provides free or low-cost demo availability would be an asset. At this site, or ones like it, it looks like Full Version download might be made available as well. I was just searching for a different game altogether - one that's on my phone - and wound up finding OOTP! Strange.

[ssstump]

I bought OOTP 10 because it looked tasty.

A few days ago i was looking for a demo of your boxing game, and despite being all over your web pages, could not find that.

On a hunch, I downloaded the game anyway, and what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a generous 'trial' plan.

If I just missed that, then bad on me, but if not, ya'll need to work on your web pages a bit to highlight the cool stuff. :-)

[RamMan12]

Somebody brought something like this up already I believe but I think a good idea is to try to peak the interest of an MLB owner or GM. If that doesn't work, maybe a minor league owner/president/etc. Football Manager has done this and now has an agreement to work with Newcastle United in the English Premier League. I'm not pretty certain that Football Manager has done well since the announcement, at least with Newcastle fans.

The only real question is how to do so in a cost-effective way, which may not be possible, but it would still be something worth looking into.

[Honorable_Pawn]

Originally Posted by evil homer

when i was in cooperstown last year, they were selling the strat-o-matic board game with the cards in the shop. i would think anyone visiting the baseball hall of fame is the perfect target audience for OOTP, so maybe some advertisements in the shop with a tagline of something like "you've just walked through baseball history, now recreate it. play OOTP!" would at least get you a few looks from people. couldn't hurt to give the people who run the hall of fame a call and see what they say.

Best Suggestion I've heard. That is a ctachy phrase. Very nice.

[ryanivr]

Originally Posted by Malleus Dei

Your market really isn't fantasy baseball players. I know a large group of them, and none of them have shown any long-term interest in OOTP or even BM or a console game. They like the ties to real baseball too much.

The console audience is lost from the start.

So what you are left with are hard-core baseball gamers and hard-core strategy gamers (and calling that audience "geeks" is demeaning, Steve, many of them are not geeks). There's your potential customer base: people who like extremely complicated baseball strategy games and people who like extremely complicated strategy games of any kind and who will play a baseball game - or, for another example, a soccer game - even though they are not baseball or soccer fans, but simply because the game is rich, detailed, offers numerous opportunities for significant decisions and rewards good decision-making.

Therefore you guys need to be selling OOTP as two things:

1. The most complex computer baseball game of all. Get some kind of slick advertising phrase behind that to tie to the game, like "OOTP, the king of baseball computer games" only better.

2. A complex and feature-rich strategy game. Puresim forged a relationship with Matrix Games, one of the biggest online marketers of strategy games, which helped sell games to new customers; maybe you should look in to affiliating yourself to either them or, say, Shrapnel Games or such, as that will get you strategy gamer eyes on your product. Or find some other way to do that.

But going after fantasy gamers will not pay off. They don't do and don't want to do complicated games like OOTP.

I completely agree with this.

[jdettbarn]

Originally Posted by Andreas Raht

Most people find us through Google, searching for "baseball games". A good Google page rank would help us. To get a good page rank, it's important that many other sites link to our site (www.ootpdevelopments.com/ootp). So, anybody who links to our site, helps us

Didn't read through most of the responses, but I do SEO for a living and one quick tip that would benefit ranking is changing the 'powered by' anchor text at the bottom of the reports:

Powered by OOTP Baseball 9 - It's your game; play it your way!

You should be getting tons of links from these reports... just make sure the anchor text is targeted toward the keywords you want to rank for...

You could also work on your title tags and keyword optimizing your content.

SEOMoz has some great tips/guides if you want to learn more fairly quickly.
SEOmoz | Professional SEO Guides

[Seamhead]

Originally Posted by blueturf

Seamheads has/had a league with very high profile names that uses OOTP as the game engine. However, it appears the 'managers' may have only been involved in selecting the initial teams and the outline of the content was not enough to keep my attention.

We (Seamheads.com) just finished our second "high profile" league and participation was spotty at best. Some of the team owners really got into it and made lineup changes throughout the season; others sent me their rosters before Opening Day and were never heard from again. We had some writers post about the league on their blogs, which brought us, and hopefully Markus, some attention. Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was especially generous with blog updates, and guys like Chad Finn (Boston Globe), Jonah Keri (ESPN), and Joe Posnanski (Kansas City Star) mentioned us on a handful of occasions as well. Curt Schilling blogged about our league at 38pitches.com. Hopefully all of the above resulted in more exposure and sales of OOTP.

I'd like to continue to spread the word about OOTP but I'm a little chagrined to read that "the outline of the content was not enough to keep my attention." So I'm open to ideas about ways to improve our content that will keep the attention of readers and future purchasers of OOTP. Let me know how we could have done better, so we can appeal to more OOTP users in the future.

Thanks!
Mike

[battists]

Thanks for all of the excellent feedback, folks.

We're creating a small team behind the scenes to do some more discussion about stuff like this, and to get help with some initiatives.

Admittedly, some of these initiatives are just a matter of needing volunteer resources to do some legwork for us.

If you'd be interested in sharing ideas and donating your time to a small developer's cause, post back here and let me know, and I'll bring you into the discussion. (You would need to sign a non-disclosure agreement...)

Thanks!

Steve

[SamuraiProgrammer]

I am a new purchaser of this game. I would like to share my decision process with you in case it helps with your marketing. I will say some critical things, but they are meant to be constructive. Be assured that I am happy with my purchase.

I first found out about OOTP when I was thinking about getting the new version of Baseball Mogul. I thought to myself, "This is an ok game, but I wonder what else there is in the genre?" I started looking.

The impression I got from an hour or so spent with google was that there were several alternative products (one of which was OOTP). My first reaction was that they were all inadequate and I would just stick with Baseball Mogul (which was at least a known quantity). This is an unfair (and incorrect) opinion that almost caused me to not find this game.

"Why would I form that opinion?", you ask. I find it easy to put into concise words, but it seems rather shallow when I do. So I will, instead, sneak up on it so it will carry the full impact.

When I begin to look for a new game to distract myself with, I generally have a few candidates in mind. These come from following a gaming news site (namely bluesnews.com). For many games, there are a myriad of successive announcements during the development process cumlinating in the GONE GOLD announcement.

I realize that there are other gaming sites, but this is the one I have used for over 10 years. In a search of their news stories, I found exactly 2 articles in 2009 - an intent to release announcement and a link to a review. There were no mentions at all in 2008.

Suggestion #1 - 'Press' releases to gaming news sites as often as your conscience will allow. If necessary, create reasons out of thin air for it to look like a news story instead of a press release. More is better because few people read all items every day.

Once I have noticed a game that might pique my interest, I then start looking for the developer site, fan sites, and forums. Of course, I look at the website for the developer as well.

The home page for OOTP Developments is a nice piece of technical web work. Unfortunately it is bland. So bland, in fact, that I wondered if I had reached a developer's site. This was the first thing that should have excited me but did not -- strike 1.

Suggestion #2 - Get some pictures of a batter in mid swing, a fielder making a diving throw, a play at the plate, a manager pulling his hair out. Something with some action. Yes, I know it is a 'text' game but guess what? The text is describing action! Even the statitics are action boiled down to numbers.

Then I went to the page for OOTP itself. Again it is a nice page, but.. After having fooled around with the game, I find the text on that page to be fully accurate and descriptive. But the first time I read it, it left me unenthused.

Suggestion #3 - Don't underestimate the need for your advertising material (i.e. WEB SITE) to LOOK like advertising material. In this day and age, we subconsciouly expect advertising to be overdone and adjust our opinions accordingly. If you simply state the facts, without an attempt at pizzaz, it falls flat.

How about this for the first page describing the game?

Take the reins as General Manager!
Draft your players!
Manage the team!
Call Every Pitch!
Or any combination of the above!
Do what you want and let the computer do the rest!
Let's PLAY BALL!

Out of the Park Baseball lets YOU take over any or all aspects of running a baseball team from 1871 until doomsday for any league, real or imagined.

Call Every Pitch
or
Simulate An Entire Season In Minutes

Are you Billy Martin or Earl Weaver? Build your team to your desires and let them compete!

Solitaire or Online Leagues!

Your Infinite Season Ticket Awaits!

click here for more details

This may not be your style, but I am willing to bet that it will draw more interest that before.

Next, I like to go to fan sites and see how much interest there is for the game. How do people play? What do they do? How much do they enjoy playing. How much competition and comradery is there? How much FUN are the players having.

I couldn't find ANY. None. Zip. Nada. Not One.

I just looked again with google and still did not find any.

Ok. Most games that are worth their salt have several competing fan sites that are a repository for things about the game that will get lost in the forums on the game site.

Encourage some of your younger customers to build a fan site or two. Those of you that are running leagues should post periodic 'news' items about your league.

There should be at least one fan site with 'non-official' suggestions on how to structure an online league.

There should be competitions for leagues where the season is run more or less 'hands off'.
One possibility would be: Pick a historical team that played about .500 ball and run a competiton for players to set up the manager sliders, the lineups, the depth charts and have a commissioner run their seasons with as few random events (injuries, etc) as possible and see who does the best.

At the very least, this will give people a chance to discuss how one strategy should work better with certain players, etc. etc. ect.

Suggestion #4 : Create situations that stimulate discussion on HOW to play. This, more than anything else, demonstrates the depth of the game. It gives prospective buyers a chance to see what the possibilities are.

Absolutely none of this may work. Or all of it may. Some of it may not make sense. But, these are my suggestions. If I have more, I will post again.

Finally, you might be interested in what ultimately made me decide to try OOTP. You will laugh.

On a forum somewhere, there were some suggestions on how to improve Baseball Mogul. A response by another player was (paraphrased) 'If I wanted to do that, I would just play OOTP!" That was when I knew I had to give it a second look.

Good Luck. I hope you succeed. I want to be able to continue to buy improved versions of this game. There will always be ideas for additions and improvements.

As a programmer for 25+ years, I am truly impressed. This is the best piece of sports simulation software I have ever seen.


Samurai Programmer

[SamuraiProgrammer]

One other thing---- Get a faster mirror for the demo download.

This is often the first impression your prospective customer gets of you. Don't let it be a negative one.

(Again all of this is offered as constructive)

Samurai

[Questdog]

Originally Posted by SamuraiProgrammer

Good Luck. I hope you succeed. I want to be able to continue to buy improved versions of this game. There will always be ideas for additions and improvements.

As a programmer for 25+ years, I am truly impressed. This is the best piece of sports simulation software I have ever seen.

Samurai Programmer

This feller makes some sense!

[Corsairs]

A very thoughtful, well-writtern response, SamuraiProgrammer. As a new customer, you have a valuable perspective on this issue. Most of us here are "the choir", so to speak; we're already converts and probably have been for awhile now, so it can be a little hard for us to step back and think about what needs to happen to create a new market for the game. And that's exactly what needs to happen if OOTP is going to grow the way we all want it to.

What you're suggesting here is spot on. I'm actually in the process of discussing OOTP marketing with my league. I think I'll link them to your post to provide ideas of what we should be thinking about.

[battists]

Originally Posted by SamuraiProgrammer

I am a new purchaser of this game. I would like to share my decision process with you in case it helps with your marketing.

This is great, Samurai, we really appreciate it!

More later, lots to decipher.