Final Assignment IT337

Final Assignment

Kendall Holm

Kaplan University

The Star Wars Combine is a game that was created in 1999 and is a browser based simulation of life in the Star Wars universe that has been in development for around 14 years now. The game has around 3000 active players and is developed by teams of volunteers. The issues that the game has is the owner of the game would like a lot more people playing and to speed up development. For this I believe we can solve with simple marketing campaigns.

The Action Plan

For getting more players to play the game we could use a simple PPC campaign on Game review sites. This would allow our game to be advertised to the correct audience and possible increase our visitor count to the web site. We can also do some SEO with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This would allow people to find us by using certain keywords. Even if people are searching for something else related to star wars they would see our link and possibly get interested in it.

For the developing part of the game the owner would like to see volunteers that are playing the game. So pretty much we are keeping this in house. The recruitment process here would be done via an e-mail campaign that would be sent to the player base of the game.

Technical Requirements

For the PPC and the SEO campaigns you would need to have an account with the appropriate web sites. For the e-mail campaign, it will be done via the games server since e-mail is already set up there and it would be free.

Analytics

For the e-mail campaign I would suggest using receipt system to see how many of them were actually read. But we would be able to see the success of the campaign by the numbers of players applying to work on the development team. For the other two I would suggest using Google Analytics and monitor keywords, site traffic, and how many times people click certain adds. We could revise the adds and keywords by monitoring the numbers and shifting them accordingly.

Budget

Using Google Analytics it would be free. But to get a premium account  you would have to contact Google to get a price. And for this reason, and judging from other Analytic Sites, I would suggest keeping 500 to 1000 dollars just in case.

Unit Eight Part Two

As with websites, you can use the same Analytics to view how well your blog is doing. Three of the most common Analytics that you can use include Page Views, Unique Viewers, and Session Duration. As for the first two, these count how many times the page is viewed and can give you an idea of the traffic that is being directed towards your blog. With the session duration you can see how many people are actually reading your blogs. Combine all of these you can get a good idea if your blog is doing what it was intended for or if there is a need for some improvement. Sometimes your comments can give insight as well.

There is ways you can make money from your blogs as well. Three things you can do include Advertisements - which is allowing a free add service to post advertisements on your blog to which you get paid per click, Donations, and paid memberships - which is to charge to view the blog.

The Star Wars Combine

Over five years ago I was in the market for a online Star Wars Game that was free. There was not many choices out there, but one did show up as being very popular and that was the Star Wars Combine. I joined this game not expecting much as from the screen shots showed it to be an old style of gaming primarily text based and few graphics. This did not deter me as I remember playing old Dungeons and Dragons games when I was a teenager.

The game itself has been in BETA now for over 12 years but seems to be still moving in the right direction. The entire Admin and Developer base is all volunteers so what do you expect right? But this was and is causing issues as the admin are lazy and sometimes hostile to the user base. They also have a hard time with suggestions; a lot of filtering going on.

But all flaws put to the side there is some good things to be said about the game. The game is supposed to be a simulation and if you can get around all of the fluff, no combat, and like economy based games this is probably a game that you can enjoy.