read this, my lord!
everyone who has been on the internet over the past few month must have seen them; those ads advertising for the latest online game evony. after seeing (for the umpteen time) another one of those ads boxed into a small square on the webpages i frequent today, i realised that the ads have actually evolved.
if you have been actually been living in a cave the last few weeks, evony is (supposedly) an online browser based game that the advertisements tout you can: 1. save the queen!, 2. play ‘discreetly’ 3. and will be free forever. and oh yes, the advertisements feature boobs quite prominently.
after doing a wiki and google search on it (ah, yes what would i do without dear wikipedia), i realised that the ads did evolve as time went by. i won’t post the pictures here but you can see for yourself here.
to be honest, i did not really notice them when they featured just the knight; it looked too generic and boring. who wants to play a game where the feature is a boring rusty stale old knight. the next ad with a sword pointed at a vulnerably posed, well endowed computer generated maiden DID capture my attention. you can’t really ignore phallic advertising can you. but no, still not interested.
not working? lets put up real women on the ads. so now we have stock images of the generic model wearing a white dress staring longing out at you, asking you to ‘save’ them. no, still not catching my attention.
this is when the makers of evony decided, well, %)@# it, lets just put a pair boobs there. surely that will entice people to click on the link! they are boobs after all!
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evony’s advertising campaign reeks of desperation. there is plenty more i can go into (like how they are apparently run by a china WOW gold mining company) , but lets just focus on 2 aspects here: advertising and gaming.
from an advertising standpoint, the ads are actually meant to capture attention, and quite successfully so, even though there might be a misrepresentation of what the game actually is. from what i have read online, there is no actual queen in the game. the official faq also writes:
How do I get my queen?
There is no queen in this game, the ad you saw is for marketing purposes and seems to be highly effective by the number of times this question has come up.
curious (or horny) individuals will feel compelled to click on the link to check out what it offers. if it has done that, the evony ads have done their job, as it is up to the main page to further sell the game. however, but using increasing amounts of cleavage in their adverts, they have earned the scorn of bloggers worldwide for their extremely distasteful ads that have nothing to do with the game. also, the adverts are becoming increasingly more and more like those web banners advertising for adult services.
i once read in the new paper (of all places) that neil french called ‘bad publicity’ the ‘holy grail’ of advertising. while it is true bad publicity (like that of the phallic burger king ad) will drive consumers to try your product, your product must be strong enough to sustain this interest.
this is where i delve into the gaming viewpoint of the game. and rip it apart to pieces.
i am gamer and i take pride in playing good games. and from what evony has shown me in its advertising, i can tell that the game is going to be of slip shod build. if a gaming developer cannot take pride in creative advertising for its games, what is to say that the game will be good? it is insulting to any decent gamer by propositioning the game like this. you don’t want to force dribble down my throat if i don’t want to play it. if you do so, i will reject it even more.
from ripping off the font AND gameplay from civilization, i expect them to get sued pretty soon.
/end rant.
