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.