Blog of Monica Valentinelli, Writer & Content Consultant

Posted on March 11, 2008 - by Monica Valentinelli

When White Wolf Gets Crazy Ideas, Should they be Exalted?

White Wolf Game Studios, creator of the World of Darkness and several other properties like Vampire: the Requiem, released a marketing promotion called Graduate Your Game today that, quite frankly, is a bit puzzling.

The idea behind it comes on the heels of the upcoming 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Simply, you trade in your old 3.5 edition D&D book to “graduate” to Exalted, a high fantasy-esque role-playing game on par with Final Fantasy. Limited to 2,500 people, you also receive a diploma and a poster.

As you can imagine, the gaming community is in an uproar. From White Wolf’s LiveJournal to The Exalted Forums and RPGnet responding to the White Wolf graduation promotion, everyone has an opinion about this program.

Well? So do I.

In an earlier post I had talked about system versus setting in game design where I blogged how both matter. What I didn’t say, is that systems and settings can also attract different types of personas or markets. In gaming, there is a fair share of folk who have extraordinary “brand” loyalty to whatever system they’re playing.

From a business standpoint, I can see why White Wolf took this approach. Behind it all, it’s a way to attract new players to a game they know people like, at an opportunistic time, to circumvent that loyalty. From a player perspective, I’m not surprised that this promotion wasn’t received well because the largest pie in the industry is D&D players. Telling them they need to graduate to a different system, setting, and company is akin to telling Diet Coke drinkers they have to trade in their 12 packs for bottles of RC Cola because it’s better tasting.

A few, poor choices of words and misleading phrases are not helping the situation. Many are commenting on this quote, speculating if White Wolf intentionally misrepresented the release of 4th edition:

Why wait until August to play a rehash of the same old game, when you could be exploring Epic Fantasy Re-Imagined all summer?

D&D 4th edition arrives in June — not August as you can see from Wizards of the Coast’s 2008 product release schedule. Semantically, White Wolf might have been talking about GenCon Indy, the largest gaming convention in August, but even so there were confused fans.

Whether you love (or hate) this promotional idea, I think that they were right to experiment. In my opinion, I believe that the one factor affecting White Wolf’s campaign, moreso than any other, was time. It’s hard to test promotions and marketing when an impending date looms and, in this case, they probably could have benefited with some testing (especially since this promotion is launched a few days after funeral of Gary Gygax.

If, as others have said, White Wolf is fairly competitive with Wizards, wouldn’t it have been better to go with a campaign that has already worked for them in the past? Instead of trading in a book, why not offer a *pdf for free?

In the end, as all marketing is going now-a-days, personalized might be the best way to go — especially in gaming where everyone seems to have a vested interest in the products or the industry. How much (or how little) companies should pay attention to their fans is still a subject for debate, but one that can be tested and refined.

It will be interesting to hear what comes out of these discussions; this promotion stirred up controversy on both sides of their fan-base. Either way, you can’t blame White Wolf for trying.