Like a lot of businesses, SOE’s no stranger to marketing strategy seminars and meetings. Those are opportunities for our business-side folks and our developers to work together toward presenting the game in its best light.
Last week, Matt Wilson (Seattle’s studio head and my boss’s boss’s boss) attended one of these strategy meetings in San Diego and came back to present the new focus of The Agency.
Apparently, market research has shown that in our target demographic, people are very interested in office politics and water cooler antics. Witness the success of movies like Office Space and shows like The Office! The cartoon Dilbert has been running for nearly 20 years. Therefore, The Agency would be in a stronger marketing position if we skewed our product ever so slightly.
Instead of being primarily an action shooter slash spy MMO, The Agency will present itself more as a virtual employment agency.
Courtney Simmons, SOE’s Director of Corporate Communications and PR, attended our meeting yesterday to give us more details. She said, “The Agency has received a lot of positive attention in its current incarnation, but we want it to reach a wider audience. The move towards a more globally recognized office structure will allow us to present the game to a much larger potential player-base.”
She added, “Players can still become spies or paramilitary operatives, but only if there are openings in those career fields.”
Matt Wilson suggested that this is a great opportunity for our coding engineers/developers to work on a project that had been side-lined: the physics of sitting on chairs.
I’m really looking forward to that. We’re going to be able to have desks and chairs that players can actually sit at! I don’t know why that’s so exciting to me, but I think it’ll be an innovation that will make a big difference in our game!
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