Marketing for Darwinia+: An Impossible Vision

The inability to shoe-horn Darwinia into any conventional and recognisable genre categories made pitching the game to publishers and customers extremely difficult. Part of the problem was that we ourselves didn't really know what we were dealing with. Attempting to define Darwinia using the available game marketing lingo proved insufficient and resulted in incomprehensible sentences, such as "Darwinia is an RTS, action-arcade shoot-em-up based in a retro-virtual, fractal landscape which pays homage to the bygone days of halcyon gaming." If you weren't already put off Darwinia by the weird-looking visuals, then you certainly were by the time you read that.

If the conventional marketing lingo was out of touch with Darwinia then so also were traditional assets that are used to market a game. Screenshots are traditionally used by marketers to tell the customer what to expect when they load up the game; think of it as an amuse-bouche in pixels. Not only do they give you an idea of the look-and-feel but if they're good, they should also give you clues about the story, your role as the gamer, and above all get you excited, making you want to quite literally jump right in and play.

It may sound like a cop-out but some games, particularly Introversion's past games, are just not seen in their best light with static screenshots. Valve understood this very well with Portal; screenshots were totally ineffective at explaining the core gameplay mechanic in this deeply addictive puzzle game. Valve got round it by creating some fantastic video trailers that literally talk you through your mission as the gamer and how to use the special Portal gun. As with most of Valve's marketing assets; these videos were clear, concise and above all made you want to press the play button.

Although Darwinia is aesthetically very beautiful to look at (Darwinia has won artistic awards from screenshots alone) screens give you very little clue as to how the game actually plays, and your role in it. Battle scenes in particular ended up looking chaotic and totally incomprehensible to the uninitiated. To some extent we tried to resolve this issue in the six mini-tutorial trailers that were subsequently created for Multiwinia's launch, each of which explained one of the game modes.

Although these videos went some way towards explaining the game more succinctly, we have yet to find a way of defining Darwinia or Multiwinia successfully in that brief instant when you the attention of your potential audience. The only exception to this might be with the Darwinian sprite figure. The figure of the little green stick man, almost rebelliously simple in an industry which rates photorealistic graphics as king, became Introversion's company logo and subsequently a symbol for creative development within the industry.

The difficulty with defining the PC versions of Darwinia and Multiwinia has led us to make an interesting decision for the marketing of Darwinia+. Rather than attempt to shoe-horn Darwinia+ into an inappropriate genre stereotype, we've decided to let the gamers decide for themselves what Darwinia is, and then pass on their thoughts to their friends across other gaming communities. The beauty of this approach is that gamers are often much better and more objective communicators about a developer's games than the developers themselves.

Obviously the major drawback with this method is that it requires a team of hardcore evangelists who've played and loved your game in the first place to start spreading the word. But thanks to a successful launch of Darwinia on Steam, success at the IGF awards and an enormous amount of journalists' good-will and enthusiasm, Introversion has accumulated a loyal following of fans that were willing to take a punt on Darwinia or Multiwinia, and are now spreading the good word on our behalf.

So it's with this following of loyal enthusiasts very much in mind that we tentatively start marketing the release of Darwinia+ this summer. We're not looking to conjure up sophisticated tag-lines or neat marketing campaigns. Instead, as has been done for successful new XBLA releases such as Braid, N+ and Castle Crashers, we're going back to our community and asking them to help spread the