Positioning Xemerys
One of the joys of being indie is doing your very own marketing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like marketing and I’ve read quite a lot about it, but the lack of time and budget means I can’t afford many mistakes.
I’m having a dilemma, while Xemerys is a strategy it is also a powerful tool for self-improvment, since it will reveal very easy your weak points and how adaptable you are when things don’t go the desired way. So I have 2 options:
1.I can position Xemerys as an economic strategy with deep gameplay for a mature audience tired of the current trend of “Let’s dumb down our games to make it more accessible to every teen or to grandma who just discovered casual gaming”. This is the easiest way for me as Xemerys puts emphases on the old-school gameplay rather than simplistic mechanics and flashy graphics. And right now, there isn’t much competition in this area.
2. I can concentrate on the educational value of Xemerys and also target non-gamers who usually don’t play games but are eager to improve themselves. Educational games are usually for kids so I should have an advantage in this area.
The most logical way would be to choose option 1 but here’s the situation: when I’ve launched Xemerys a few months ago , I’ve promoted it on such communities but got very unpromising results. The Caesar/sim city players said could not figure the game (what?! Xemerys is very much inspired from such classics) while the Civilization fans seem to hate anything which contains the word “online” ( I’m very curious how Civ Network will fare ) or “massive multiplayer” as a matter of fact. And many players of trendy strategies (Travian, Ikariam etc) didn’t have the brainpower required to survive in Xemerys (oh and probably the lack of cute animations and “let’s build armies and pillage each other to borindeath”).
So perhaps people who like to improve themselves will find Xemerys not only useful but also a fun tool, the only problem is that many of them don’t like computer games. Or they do play but only casual stuff and “strategy” is a taboo word…
Now, what should I do? Choosing one option seems to discount the other (that’s why they are called “options” stupid!) and neither look very promising. What do you say: old-school strategy for mature gamers or educational strategy for anyone who want to improve their decision making ability?
