Publisher Meteor Entertainment has been financing Adhesive Games for more than two years while developing its free-to-play giant robot game, Hawken, yet they have no intention to spend any money marketing it.
"If a game is really good, it should be all word of mouth, in a perfect world. We're not spending any money against advertising and we're not doing any paid media," explained Meteor's vice president of transmedia marketing and promotions Paula Cuneo. "We're really making sure that the product itself and the experience you get interacting with the company means you want to stay around."
And Cuneo is confident that they have the right type of fans for that strategy to work. "We've created a bunch of advocate groups. We have what we call Hawken's Heroes, people who have played the longest who are great advocates. They have their own forums and we can poll them about all sorts of things," he said. "Those are the guys who aren't just making the game better, but making games as a service better. We want to make sure people stick around even when we make a mistake, because we want to fix that mistake."