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Meridian 59 Offers Free Trial

Psychochild writes "I'm the owner of the online RPG Meridian 59. We've been working hard on updating the game since relaunching it in 2002, rewriting the rendering engine to take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration, adding modern features like mouselook and rebindable keys, fixing bugs, and adding new content. We're currently offering a free trial of Meridian 59 for those interested in learning more about the game and the independent developers now running it."

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  1. Re:Free advertising by Psychochild · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not an ad, it's marketing. It's funny how people get bent out of shape when an independent developer mentions his or her game, but when a story is just a copy and paste of a press release no one cares. Yeah, I posted up about the free trial, but that's because we don't pay a marketing department several million dollars to market the game less obviously.

    For example, look at the Ilovebees.com stories lately. People know that this is marketing for Halo 2, but I didn't see as much outrage when Slashdot posted news about that site. That's because Ilovebees.com is an interesting, free game. Well, the M59 trial is an interesting free game that just happens to be marketing for the commercial servers. :)

    Realistically, what am I going to get out of this? Not much. I willingly labeled my post as a Games section, and even after several hours of being posted, there's less than two dozen replies to the thread. Perhaps I should have had one of my events people role-play a sexist bastard so we could have gotten on the front page like A Tale in the Desert did?

    Anyway, you can check my posting history to see that I usually write insightful posts, mostly in the Games section. It's not like I'm coming around astroturfing. I actually contribute to the community. At the very least I try to spend my moderator points modding up posts in the games section.

    Anyway, Allaran, I'll have to check out your games. I'm a big believer in independent developers. Marketing is a very important aspect of getting people to notice your game. We independents can't spend millions of dollars on big magazine 2-page ads and TV spots. We've spent our money on developing our game, and if we don't pimp our own games no one is going to know about them. Don't let the people tell you otherwise. Wish I could have modded you up instead of having to reply to people here.

    Have fun,

    --
    Brian "Psychochild" Green
    MMO developer's blog