Reputations: Part 1

Word-of-mouth marketing—also known as "viral" or "memetic" marketing in some circles—is the most powerful form of publicity available to you. The technique has the huge advantage of inherent trust: people lay a lot of store by their friends' recommendations, so if you can get those friends to recommend your game, you're onto a winner. You might not necessarily see first-week sales records smashed, but you can certainly ensure that your game maintains long-term interest. This makes word-of-mouth publicity particularly suitable for games with long shelf lives. This covers any game that doesn't rely primarily on cutting-edge technology to make it attractive to players: shareware card games and puzzle games are a classic case in point.

Of course, this form of marketing requires that you have a good game to sell. People simply won't recommend a lemon to their friends. (If your game is truly dire, they might not even recommend it to their own worst enemies.)

Another problem this form of marketing poses is that it requires building a critical mass of support before you can see its effects. It takes a while after the initial release of your game for the recommendations to build up any noticeable momentum. Exceptions to this occur when someone with many useful contacts—and the means and desire to communicate with them—gets wind of your game. Many games developers will have been told about two of the most original games designed in recent years, Balasz Rozsa's Elast-O-Mania and Chronic Logic's Pontifex, through their own contacts. Neither was advertised in the traditional way, but relied on word of mouth to build up that critical mass of support. It is often argued that this type of sales technique might be the future of many independent developers.

The power of the Internet has made this type of marketing by far the most effective for smaller developers. Hotmail, for example, grew from zero to several million accounts solely by attaching its "free email" offer to all e-mails sent from its users. For larger developers, who are more concerned with making a big splash, the problem lies not with games players, but with the fact that you can't sell hot air: the games mentioned in the last paragraph were essentially self-funded, which is fine if the game is small in scale, but far harder to do if you're working on a multi-million dollar project.

There is also a lot to be said for starting small and working your way up the scale. id Software did this in their shareware days: Doom simply wouldn't have been possible if they hadn't had the income from their earlier games to fund it.