Marketing Thread

[Quintillus]

You may have noticed a flurry of activity from me recently. Credit where credit is due - I've been inspired by a few other members' work recently (you know who you are), and the brain cells are coming up with new ideas and dusting off and improving old ones as a result. This thread is a sort of unification thread for the common theme, as well as an explanation of the "why" behind the next thread on the same topic (upcoming in a few days).

Recently I've been thinking quite a bit a bit about the "whole product" concept in marketing. Let's wind the clock back to 1985 and suppose you were considering buying a VCR for the first time. Would you go with Betamax or VHS? The video quality is superior on Betamax. But most people went with VHS? Why? Well, in part because there were more VHS rental stores. That wasn't an attribute of the "core product" - VHS itself - but it was part of the "whole product" you were buying into. Similarly, if you are considering buying an electric car, you may go with a Tesla due to its Supercharger network, which makes the "whole product" better even if it doesn't make the car itself better.

So I got to thinking about what we could do to improve the "whole product" of our community's creations. We're already pretty good at the "core product" of creating interesting Civ III mods. But I think we have a lot of opportunity to apply our creativity to publicizing our creations beyond the confines of the Civilization III sub-forum. I also think it would be in our interest to do so. Our community is most successful when new members discover us and join us, and when existing members continue to find things they are interested in and stick around. Meanwhile, there are always flashy new games threatening to pull existing members away, not to mention other life events, and I'd be lying if I said I played as much Civ III in the past 5 years as I did in 2006-2010. It's impressive that we still have a decent-size community nearly 20 years after the game's release, but it has gradually been shrinking and we shouldn't take its continued existence for granted.

Investing some thought and effort into marketing what we've created will draw in new members and keep existing members here, and in turn that will lead to more creations that we can market. It can be a virtuous cycle.

With that out of the way, I'd like to touch on several ideas and points related to the concept:

Marketing Within CFC

Spoiler :

Last January, I made a thread about revitalizing the CFC home page. It is not what it was in its glory days, and I suspect not a lot of people visit it intentionally these days. Nevertheless, it's still a way to potentially get people interested in Civ III, and Civ III can help contribute to its revitalization.

The Civ II community has started making good use of it to promote interesting new mod developments; the Civ VI community uses it to share Firaxis-based updates, though not yet community ones. I suspect two additional communities would be enough to reaching the threshold of being worth checking for a good chunk of the CFC community; we could be one, and one would hope at least one of Civ IV -> Civ VI could become the other.

You can scroll down a bit to find the most recent Civ II post on the home page, which was made in late November.

End of Year Competitions

Spoiler :

Both the Civ III and Civ IV communities used to post monthly montages of new creations to the home page. We might actually be able to resume this; we had a lot of units created in 2020, and at that pace we could make a monthly post without much difficulty.

However, to start with, I propose we brush off the End of the Year Competition, and once it is concluded, make a post to the home page about it. Let the community know we're still alive and creating, and invite them to check out some of our top work from the past year.

Decade Award

Spoiler :

I recently made a post noting that we should continue the Decade Awards in this year, the 20th anniversary of Civ's release. As part of that, we should absolutely share the results with the greater community. Quite a few people have moved on to newer versions of Civ, but what could be more tempting to come back for a game than trying the Mod of the Decade that you didn't even know existed before?

As part of this, the creators of these works (as well as all the other nominees) will receive more interest in and appreciation for what they've created.

Marketing Outside of CFC

Spoiler :

The landscape of the Internet has changed over the past 20 years. When CFC was new, forums were king, the newfangled successor and alternative to BBSes and Usenet. Today, forums are the elder statesman on the scene, still providing a very useful model of interaction and more organization than many of the newer alternatives, but not the first point of call for many fans as they were in Civ III's prime.

As a practical matter, we should also make some effort to promote our works elsewhere, and encourage people to visit CFC and learn about our creations.

One place could be the Steam forums for Civilization III. These are not very active, but there are some recent posts where people were asking about mods (and some replies linking to mods hosted on CFC). If we start organizing content to place on the CFC main page, it would not be much extra work to post a thread in the Steam discussion group with a link to that news. There may be a similar option on GOG.

There are also various other Civ-related communities, some of which I'm likely not aware of. I only recently became aware of a multiplayer Civ III community that organizes games via Discord, and plays both unmodded and modded Civ III. civforum.de remains active, and while I know there is some cross-pollination, there is likely additional opportunity here (in both directions). There is probably a Civ III community on Reddit as well.

There may also be some opportunity to garner some interest via streaming on YouTube or Twitch, particularly with scenarios featured in the yearly or decade-ly awards. This is an area I am not well acquainted with, but it stands to reason that there may well be some strategy-focused streamers who would have interest in trying particularly well-renowned Civilization mods.

Finally, for the most high-profile efforts, it couldn't hurt to reach out to members of the gaming press. Remember this Civ II article from 2013? If one player's Civ II game could become newsworthy across a significant portion of the gaming press, we should be able to get at least some part of that press interested in a community compilation of the best mods of a whole decade.

Summary

Most of us (myself included) don't work in marketing. Maybe we're historians, maybe we're technical, maybe we just like playing video games and Civ III is one of our favorites. But that doesn't mean we can't put a marketer's hat on and innovate in that area, too. At worst, it will be an unsuccessful experiment. At best, we'll draw new members into our community and experience a renaissance of creativity. At the mid-point, we'll do a better job sharing among ourselves what we have created, and likely draw in a few visits from past members who see something of interest to them.

That seems worth it to me, but I can't make all of this happen by myself, and am most motivated when there is buy-in and collaboration from others. Who else would be interested in helping make this happen?

 

[Civinator]

In the CCM2 and RARR threads I frequently have the honour to welcome new members at CFC (the last one in the CCM2 thread today). I am astonished, how many people still are interested in this nearly 20 year old Civ 3 game. This can not be measured in the number of likes for a Civ 3 object (per example I received more likes by saying thank you in an OT post at CFC than for a decade of work in one of my Civ 3 mods), but it can be seen in the number of downloads of the work that was done for Civ 3.

I think the idea of having a better presence at steam and GOG is a good idea. Reflections about the use of searching machines like google could be interesting, too. As I don´t have the steam version of Civ 3 (and I´m glad about it) I will have a look, what can be done here at GOG.

 

[Puppeteer]

Interesting points, and yes I'm still salty about VHS beating out Betamax.

Really good point about forums. It's occurred to me several times that very few Civ III players have expanded into YouTube or Twitch. And I don't think I've seen much mod play done on YouTube, and that seems like it would be an obvious marketing approach to Civ III and the mod community. Heck, I hang out here, and I don't really play mods and couldn't describe much about how the play and experience is different in modded games.

But there is clearly potential. SuedeCivIII is approaching 4k subscribers on Civ III content channel! I mean he's not getting a silver Play Button award in the near future, but for a 20-year-old game, that is rather stunning to me. And he does a little mod play from what I've seen.

This is an observation, not criticism, but HOF and COTM aren't new-player approachable. I understand why; it takes a lot of effort to create and run the competitions, and the reliable participants would be far too disinterested in an easier game. Perhaps some other gamification of participation can be organized? (Gamification of playing a game?)

I guess it all comes down to effort and persistence. I'm personally very spotty on the persistence part.

 

[WildWeazel]

I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of Civ3 activity on reddit and discord servers, which are probably enjoying a bump from @SuedecivIII and his streaming on youtube. There are still a lot of players and interest in mods out there.

 

[Quintillus]

It is true that for a 20-year-old game, Civ III does pretty well in terms of still getting new players. I've also had the honor of welcoming newcomers, primarily when I was more active in Stories & Tales. I suspect Civ III benefits from being 80% cheaper than Civ IV on GOG (and 83% or so on Steam); for someone who hears Civilization is good but doesn't want to spend much when initially trying it, the price point is appealing. And it doesn't hurt that Civ III has aged well and supports modern resolutions. I've considered some strategy games on GOG and decided I didn't really want to have to put up with a 2000-era 800x600 user interface; Civ III doesn't have that problem.

Interesting point re: HOF and COTM. In the case of a Hall of Fame, I think it's kind of inherent in the institution that it isn't very new-player approachable. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isn't very approachable to high school rock bands, either. However, as a point of aspiration for new players, I think it still serves an important marketing role for CFC. In fact, it is the first part of CFC I can remember discovering. Way back around 2003, years before I created an account (or had halfway decent Internet at home) and not long after I'd started playing Civ III, I remember surfing the Internet at a friend's place on his Windows ME computer. We must have been looking up something around the best Civ III scores or whether it was possible to beat Deity, and came across the Civ III Hall of Fame. We spent a fair amount of time perusing it (probably including some of the write-ups), and it put CFC on my radar for the first time.

COTM is interesting, I know there have been times I've thought, "it's been awhile since I played a GOTM, I wonder what's going on there?", pulled up the page, seen that the only games were Deity level of higher, and not bothered to start it as I may have if it were lower levels. And sometimes the ostensibly lower-level games have very challenging map starts; I recall losing on Warlord a few years ago on a particularly unforgiving GOTM start. Not to mention that as a new player, it's highly likely you will finish last or near-last if you finish at all, and that sticks out more in a smaller player pool than if you're 87th out of 113 as was possible in the early days.

But I'm thinking a more constructive way of bringing new players in might be to try to come up with some new community event rather than trying to modify a format that works well for an audience that is highly reliable and highly skilled in Civ III. A few years ago I had a "Scenario of the Quarter" idea, which was similar but would focus on all participants playing the same mod and sharing experiences. It didn't garner much interest at the time, but as I think about how my workplace has a "Movie of the Week" (virtual) event, it seems like perhaps it's worth dusting off again... it would be relatively easy to set up versus a GOTM, as it would use existing scenarios and not require a score comparison mechanism or spoiler threads.

I took a look at Suede Civ III's channel; that is a lot of Civ III content! And China on Sid in the WWII scenario... I might have to take a look at that, as I've only won it on Sid as Japan.

 

[Takhisis]

I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of Civ3 activity on reddit and discord servers

Do share this information.

 

[WildWeazel]

subreddits: /r/civ3, /r/Civilizations
discord: single player, players league, /r/civ official
more links from Suede here

 

[Takhisis]

*Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee*