Distribution in Asia-Pacific and query for Funcom marketing
Starting a thread for those of us who live in Asia and the Oceania regions.
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Here's the fact:
The Asia-Pacific region is teeming with active and dedicated gamers and there are many games being well-marketed and distributed and supported in this huge region. Where MMORPGS are concerned, games like EQ, AC, UO, Lineage and SWG will enter gaming conversations easily. However, Anarchy Online has neither top-of-the-mind presence nor shelf presence.
Here's my experience:
In Singapore, I have only ever seen a display box of AO (yes the empty display box type) way back in July 2001 and it stayed displayed for only a week. Stores here do not carry AO much less heard of the Notum Wars booster. All of the Singaporeans I know still playing (not many of us left as numbers have been dwindling over the year) ... all downloaded AO during Live Launch. We do not have the AO cd.
For myself, I recently had NW activated as an ingame friend very kindly and sweetly gave me the booster as a christmas present. More likely he took pity on me also, heh. However, as a customer, I remain highly concerned about getting future boosters and expansion packs.
Here's my query for Funcom marketing:
It is obvious your main distribution efforts are for the North America and Europe markets but will you eventually look into the distribution for Asia-Pacific? If not, then will download options be made available after a suitable lead-time for shelf sales has passed?
put it up for download already!
i am german and in my area (population density around 2-3k people per square mile .. which is about that what the shadowrun pen and paper mmorpg used for heavy sprawl areas. nrw rhein/emscher&co) i found exactly 1 copy after checking the 2 biggest malls around.
the bigger chains had 1 ordered due to "arrive sometime in december".
if the reason to not offer it for download was to get shelf presence before christmas they utterly failed - nuff said.
Notum Wars Availability non-existant
I too was dealt with the problem of paying twice as much to order NW from the states. I found this to be absurd considering that the main activation for the booster pack is the registration of a serial number on your accounts page.
Also after specificly requesting a major hardware/software retail outlet [harvey norman] to order it in (they had no record of it being available on their systems) and not hearing from them for over two weeks, one of my US based friends bought the game for me from a local store and contacted me with the serial code.
I have been using NW ever since.
If you [funcom] wish to create an artificial market to get boxes on shop shelves you should spend more work on your distribution channels rather than thinking up ideas on how to force ppl to demand things from shops that have no capability of even locating your product. Especially when all that is needed for an existing player is a key code.