I’ve been looking at other games and I truly believe that GW2 has as much to offer as any of them, and more… and it’s a hell of a lot more exciting to watch than LoL.
So why do they get thousands, in some cases tens of thousands of viewers on twitch and the massive player base that such numbers would indicate while GW2 does not?
Simple, most people have never really seen GW2, even if they have heard the name.
Anet has really been missing the boat in the marketing and promotion department by not being far more aggressive on Twitch. Imagine getting an ad showing and talking about WvWvW before you go to a Twitch channel about BDO and it’s simple little open world PvP and where one little guild can “declare war” on another little guild.
Imagine getting an ad showing GW2 5 man PvP and pointing that there are various roles such as bunker and roamer when you go to an Overwatch channel… a game that is about 6 man PvP in first person, with various roles to play.
Imagine getting an ad showing WvWvW and explaining the complexity of strategies as you go to a LoL channel, where people appreciate a good strategy.
There is an audience of millions out there, all people who game… all people who already appreciate many of the kinds of things that GW2 has been doing for years. And any marketing high school student can tell you that a concentrated pool of people you know are already interested in similar products to the ones you offer… that’s a gold mine. Those people are called Pre-Qualified Prospects.
And the ability to drop tailored ads into an audience made up of basically 100% Pre-Qualified Prospects is an opportunity that no company can afford to miss.
I’m blown away that Anet hasn’t been all over this sooner. Marketing, and those who set the budget for Marketing, need to make this a top priority, because you’re never going to see a better concentration of potential customers anywhere.
Target audiences just don’t get any better than this.
PS: If Anet is doing any Twitch ads, I haven’t seen a single one of them in well over a month of checking out all kinds of game streams. Not even once, let alone the number of times an average person needs to see an ad before they buy.