My Masters Research Project, Survey Within

[BananaMan]

As some of you may know I am in my second year of a part time Masters in Marketing, and the time has come to do my Research Project. If all goes well the project dissertation will be published in a journal, and students from around the world will be able to refer to my work to aid their studies in the future.

The question I have posed to address in my Project is as follows.

Why is brand association, and brand loyalty key within the MMORPG Market?

Please fill in the following survey as honestly as you can, as I will be putting all the information into my project, and using it to make fancy graphs and charts. I know most of the responses here will be biased, but I am using this as a pilot to test the water for a bigger survey.

To keep this private as possible, I don?t want your names, but I would like your geographical region e.g. Europe, America.

Either email your response to shoemaker@shoesforpigeons.com or PM me either is fine, Thanks.

Geographical Location: Please Specify

1. What do you look for first in MMORPG? Pick one from the six choices.
a) Story , The Background
b) Player versus Player
c) Crafting
d) Player versus Enemy
e) Community
f) Graphics
g) Other (Please Specify)
2a) What was/is your favourite MMORPG that you have/are played/playing?
2b) Why was it your favourite? Pick one from the five choices.
a) Economy
b) Crafting
c) Player versus Player Combat
d) Player versus Enemy Combat
e) Community
f) Other (Please Specify)
3a) From your experience in MMORPG Market, who is the best Publisher?
3b) What Game makes that Publisher stand out from others? Please Specify
3c) Why is that game the best, in your opinion? Pick one from the five choices.
a) Economy
b) Crafting
c) Player versus Player Combat
d) Player versus Enemy Combat
e) Community
f) Other (Please Specify)
4a) Which MMORPG Publisher do you associate with the development of ?bad? games?
4b) Which game did they fail on? Please Specify
4c) What are the reasons for their failure, Pick one from the 7 choices.
a) Gameplay Dynamics
b) Development Changes
c) Economy
d) Lack of Community
e) Lack of Player versus Enemy Content
f) Lack of Player versus Player Content
g) Customer Service
h) Other (Please Specify)
5. Any additional comments, Please write here.

Don't forget email your response to shoemaker@shoesforpigeons.com or PM me either is fine, Thanks.

 

[BananaMan]

You can comment in the thread too, by the way keeps it alive I suppose.

 

[pussycat]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(BananaMan @ Sep 14 2006, 10:27 AM) [snapback]116504[/snapback][/center]

Why is brand association, and brand loyalty key within the MMORPG Market?
[/b]

Well, based on past experience, even decades-old brand loyalty can go out the window pretty fast when the publisher of the game keeps treating customers like ****.

I don't know that this is the kind of comment you were looking for, but it's always nice to vent some more.

 

[Stavrose]

Take for example Midway. I've been inside their corporate HQ here in Chicago. My good friend has done some contract work for them on some of their games. Let me tell you how terrible Midway has become. They had a good foothold in the game industry early on, with the Mortal Kombat Trilogy and NFL Blitz. Now the company has become a zombie. The guys at the top only care about their pockets. There is almost NO motivation amongst employees to work on projects, cause the projects are usually poorly thought up and lack creativity or innovation. Midway's equipment is outdated as well. When I was touring for a second time earlier this year, the crew was working on the new Blitz game. After talking with some of the staff, they told me that the new Blitz game was actually the only project where they've had "some" fun working on, primarily cause they didn't have any NFL licensing restrictions, so they were able to do whatever they wanted (add swears, ass kicking, etc). Aside from that, there is no positive energy vibe amongst the employees.

It is all about who you know in that company. There are some brilliant employees working there whose talents won't be discovered just cause they don't know the next guy up. There is a guy who works there who literally is a gopher. He makes $300,000 a year and HAS NO JOB TITLE. I'm dead serious, all he does is go from department to department, asks dumb questions like, "everything ok?" or collects reports needed by higher ups. He doesn't do jack shit, but gets paid 300k a year cause he is chummy with an exec. Midway needs some major restructuring internally and externally. Unfortunately, it won't happen because all they need to do is keep producing games that meet par shareholder demands and keep the corporate pockets fat.

I shit you know, this is all true, I saw it with my own eyes. I was there. If you think SOE is bad, wait till you see the inside of Midway