SCAM? THIS IS NECROSTORM ADV!!!
Hi everybody, I’m Giulio De Santi, President of the Necrostorm Company, and it’s time to share our little secret adv campaign that we have been doing for the last 2 years.
When we released Adam Chaplin, and we received the unexpected and awesome sales results, my friend Marco Viola, Director of Splattercontainer asked me in an interview why we didn’t dub our movieTaeter City in Italian.
In all honestly, we dubbed the movie in English just because we knew it would sell better. It was then I decided to try a “weird” marketing strategy. Considering the Italian sales were not good, it was my goal to increase them as well. I just took inspiration from Italian “tv talk shows” where the more politicians scream and throw out insults, the more people watch. So I released a very offensive interview, proclaiming that “we would never release a movie in Italian, and that this country sucks”. Of course the reaction was predictable: people were offended and started to insult and hate me, but weirdly the sales started to INCREASE at a rate of over 300%, with many satisfied and happy customers. We are talking about little numbers because Italian markets are almost dead, but that worked perfectly fine. Indeed we also released a special edition for the Italian market on Splattercontainer, and the customers are happier and have increased in size.
I thought then: let’s try this on a bigger scale on the worldwide sales.
-1When we decided to create Death Cargo, we decided to create fake “mortal Kombat 9” fatalities to start getting views and attention from game players.
-2Then we started to create the game and started to follow the fan’s directive/suggestions, everything was fine but sometime delays and problem happened. We are a little company and this is our first game. When this happened we noticed an increase in the hype and exposure, and of course the hate that came with it. We decided then to release 4 gameplays, 7 betas, and STOP releasing video material all together. Doing this the hype rose, and people started to talk bad about the game: the more they talked negatively about the game, the buzz about the game grew.
-3When we finished creating the game and all fan’s suggestions were applied, we decided to release the game and put it on pre-order, without revealing video material. We have a total of 18,567 actual movie customers spread throughout the world. It doesn’t seem like much, but there are enough to allow us to live pretty well and continue producing movies. Now with this big community only 800 people pre-ordered the game, and very few were actual game fans.
-4. So we decided to put more gas on fire and adopt a more aggressive strategy: we contacted all our movie fans’ that bought the game, and we offered them a refund of 1/3 of the price if they didn’t reveal any material on web. They accepted, and not a single image or comment has been posted. Just few package pictures and a couple screens, really not much. People then began to start having doubts about the game.
-5 Then we experienced an unfortunate/fortunate set of issues, about 20 packages were blocked at customs so 20 customers didn’t receive their game. They obviously started to post comments, and of course we started to support them. This created and increased the doubts that the game was a scam, because only negative comments were available.
-6 We released only a few pics, delaying the trailer giving out the most absurd excuses and posting weird messages like “eastern eggs”, to increase the hype and the “WTF” feeling. When that happened the insults and hate started to arrive from new users. The more they insulted us, the more people purchased the game. The more that were blocked, the more comments and sales came in as a result.
-7 At that point, we released the digital edition and many users bought it. Then between the customers that bought it and also old users like Mikemetroid and his friends from TYM forum (that were obviously putting in doubts of the existence of this game on their forum). We decided then to refuse their money and not give them our game. Of course this created the chain reaction we were hoping for , they started to hate us along with hundreds of people. Masterblizak also joined some of the forums to keep the conversations going. In the end we had finally reached our goal: Yannic from Kotaku contacted us. Without this absurd situation he would never have contacted us and dealt with us, and written an article about a game that only 800 people bought
-8 We needed to continue playing the game by our rules. We started hassling everyone with legal action, we did the same with the most important forums, this obviously increased the hate and the hype at the same time. This was not enough. We needed to release the trailer. We promised that people who already had their game would release material…. but we contacted them and asked them to continue keeping everything a secret. In the end we unbanned all the “haters” and stopped removing their comments.
THE RESULT: We finally reached our sales goals, and the more people that came to insult us and offend us, the more we sold. We had soo many digital downloads that we also had problems with the file creation and the server uploading. THIS IS JUST AWESOME!!
My staff and I wanted to thank you all for this great support. All of you have been part of a big chess game, a few conscious players and many other unconscious players, but you all had a role in this game. We would like to immensely thank
- The 800 who pre-ordered for their secret help as well
-Thank to all the new 5134 customers
-Also a great thanks to the haters for their comments and awesome exposure.
-Thanks to all forums that insulted us and called us “thieves”
-Thanks to Yannic from Kotaku and his unsuspecting help, he plaid his rule perfectly
-And of course the users that really had problem with their shipment
Without spending much on our end (refunding the 1/3 of initial packages, asking to not post material) we obtained about a ten thousand dollar adv campaign, and obtained more than 5000 extra in sales orders. Sure we suspect many people really hate us now, but this needed to get an otherwise unknown game to sell very well. We knew that this was very “niche” game and only splatter fans would appreciate it.
THANK YOU FROM ALL OUT HEARTS, WE LOVE YOU
Giulio De Santi and Necrostorm Staff
so you'd know who I'd use. I can picture it now if that happened, people would hate on Chucky's hitbox haha. Though, at first I was scared of Chucky when I was a kid when the first movie came out haha. I watched it from the next room haha.
