Netease – TX2 – Strange marketing strategy

I was planning to do the SINA’s part of the video shootout series. But I think I need to give an update on the status of TX2 and its strange marketing plan.

As mentioned before, NTES provided almost no marketing prior to TX2’s open beta. Most people in China had no idea that NTES even had a game called TX2.

For the open beta, NTES did some low level marketing consists of mostly a few banner ads on the gaming website like 17173.com and some peer to peer program.

As reported, even NTES management were surprised of the little amount of players playing TX2 right now.

Well, in the last couple of weeks, even those low levels of marketing had been removed. There were ZERO marketing (as far as I can tell) for TX2 in the last 2 weeks.

A danger sign is that there are little new players in TX2. Most of the players in TX2 are high level players. It is dangerous for a game with very little new players because it destroys the balance of the game (in terms of game playing and economic system).

Today, I noticed that there is a small banner ads for TX2 on 17173.com.

Compared with what other companies were doing with marketing their games, NTES is probably spending less than 1% of what its competitor did on marketing.

I just hope a good game like TX2 won’t go to waste because of NTES’s seemly psychologically distaste for marketing.