There is quite a discussion right now about how blizzard is marketing the whole Diablo3 thing. To say on the pro side, Blizzard did prefer a well finished game over the Christmas sales and pushed back the release date to 2012.
But how they “advertise” their game is not even funny anymore. There is this mysterious beta which started like a month back. After the Friends and Family-beta now everyone got his hopes up to be lucky and get a beta-key. For a whole month now people check their battle.net accounts daily (or even more often than that) just to realize one day, that only people from big fansites got into this “beta” so far.
The Beta itself should be used not for finding bugs or anything but for server-testing and -adjustments alone. So Blizzard promised they would send more keys when server where stable and they need more people for testing. They even gave out information on the times when keys would been send out. Working-times from Monday morning to Friday evening. That is – as you can see – not helpful at all. For this last month no one in the forums claimed to have a new invite. But this nerve wrecking situation is not enough for blizzard.
They started now a facebook lottery for 200 keys. All you have to do is give them a “like” and tell your friends about this “chance” to win. A great advertisement for them. And having over 2milion likes it leaves again a huge mass of disappointed fans who got once more hyped and their hopes up.
My boyfriend on the contrary told me to not get my hopes up at all because we live in Europe. Why would they want to test their American server with European people? When the time of releasing comes there will be test for European servers as well with the adjustment knowledge they got from current beta. But who knows when this time comes? Maybe in January? Still Blizzard won’t say anything at all to release their European fans from hoping and checking their email-accounts nonstop.
But now the marketing guys from blizzard did the most lame thing so far. There were no hope, but still my boyfriend does checke his battle.net account once in a while just to find this today:
In his main battle.net page – where all the games you own are listed - is a Diablo3 icon with a little “coming soon” beneath. So what does this mean? Of course you are happy the fist moment, but you would not trust it that easy. After he told me about it and I checked my account I found the same thing. Truthfully speaking everyone got the same thing. Guess what? It’s a lame advertisement-thing again and we'll all likely be staring at the ironic "Coming soon" notice for several months now.
Thank you Blizzard… And I think they just don’t care about breaking their fans hearts the whole time. Because in the end everyone is still going to buy and play that game.
