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Recent Headlines for Pirates of the Burning Sea

Free Trials and Marketing Plans

By Keith Cross on Jun 19, 2008

Flying Lab Software has revealed their new marketing strategies for Pirates of the Burning Sea, which will include offering 14 day free trials.

Now that we’re finishing off 1.5, I thought I’d tell you about our upcoming plans for how we’re going to market Pirates. We’ve been waiting on 1.5 as it has lots of great fit and finish features that improve the game significantly. While there’s more to come in 1.6 (including new tutorials) we think 1.5 is the right build to start up the new marketing initiatives.

SOE’s strategy in marketing the game for launch was twofold—good retail box presence, and focusing on saturation ads on a couple of big web sites. That’s not unreasonable for a launch, but what we’re focusing on now is making the game easy to get into and to expose it to a wide audience. To that end, we’re starting free trials in July (towards the middle or latter part) which will let players try out the game for 14 days and see if it’s for them. We’ve done the work to make sure players can’t use a trial account as a mule account or to spam other players, and at the end of the 14 days, they can convert those accounts into real accounts and continue playing with their character.