Aeria's a marketing dwarf, but this game is huge

venusky

Aeria's method of marketing Kingdom Heroes with its static content on the homepage prior to closed beta launch and that half-naked girl staring at you every time you visit, in my opinion, did not do the game a bit of justice.

How many of us were waiting for this game for weeks, but still a bit apprehensive whether it would be worth our time, hard drive space, bandwidth and quite possibly even our wallet?  Those thoughts crept into my mind every time I visited the Kingdom Heroes page at the Aeria portal, seeing the same content everyday, all the while hoping for something that would without a doubt sell me.

Sure, I've played Dynasty Warriors and from the look of KH's video and screens, it didn't seem to differ THAT much.

Let's not kid around;  - Aeria's strength is providing higher-end free mmorpg games and with 13 million members worldwide, they have a lot of expectations to meet. I was a bit saddened that they would churn out a mere mmo replica of Dynasty Warriors. 

Then I started playing when closed beta was launched.

All the worries I had about melted away as I grew my corps of fighters and started taking names and kicking some butt on land AND sea!  What a great game I thought.  What a difference from my opinion of only a day prior to closed beta.

Why didn't Aeria market this better?  I'm sure there are thousands of potential players who thought, 'Dynasty Warriors ripoff, NEXT game please', only to hear from their core Aeria flatmates that it's worth it after all, by cracky!  Now they have to stop downloading Grand Fantasia or cancel their interim mmo doses of Evony and Farmville restarts because Kingdom Heroes has become the new fix!  I guess Word-of-mouth spreads just as fast as any ad campaign and costs nothing to Aeria (they do have a lot of banner ads out there nonetheless).

Im not trolling for comments or approval in this thread, but is it me or does Aeria let players market for them a bit too much and a bit late? Sure, not every game that's marketed heavily prior to launch is a winner and honestly, the bucks sunk into development and marketing combined can be staggering if a game fails.  But when you have a game this good compared to their other titles, you gotta admit, it deserved a bit more pre-beta hype.