Gaming and How to Create Unsurpassed Customer Loyalty

Hey, this is Rudy Fernandez. My guest this episode is Alan Wilson, co-founder and co-owner of Tripwire Interactive. It's a gaming company that's grown to millions of users in a really short amount of time. Tripwire gamers are fiercely loyal to the games and to the brand itself. We talked about how Tripwire does that. We also talked about how gaming companies give fans a voice in designing mods for their product. Also, we talked about shooting stuff. Welcome to Marketing Upheaval.

Complete show notes and transcript available at www.creativeouthouse.com/podcast.

Thanks for listening to Marketing Upheaval. My guest is Alan Wilson, vice president, co-owner and one of the founders of Tripwire Interactive. Tripwire has released ground-breaking games like Red Orchestra, the Killing Floor series, Vietnam, Chivalry, and Maneater. They have more than 10 million users and growing and we're going to talk about how they do that. Thanks for joining me, Alan.

Getting Started
Alan Wilson: My pleasure.

Rudy: So, you actually started with a game before you had a company, right?

Alan: It'd be polite to call it a game. It was what we call a mod, which is where you take somebody else's game, hack it around and make it actually good.

Rudy: But you won the Make Something Unreal contest in 2004.

Alan: Yeah. It was originally intended to be a contest for amateurs. And as we discovered on the way through, we were the only amateur team in the top 10 competing. The rest were all pros trying to catch some extra cash.

Rudy: Wow. That's when you decided, "Well, we should do this for a living."

Alan: Yeah, well, I mean when we won the contest, we got a lot of press acclaim, we had, I don't know, half a million people playing the mod and we kind of all sat around and went, "What do we do now? We kind of better do a company or something because Epic's kind of expecting something." So we did.

Rudy: The perception of a gamer is always the nerd in the room by himself in his mom’s basement, but it’s actually moving more and more female now. It’s 56-44 male-female.

Alan: Yeah.

PC Digital Marketing Platform

Rudy: And there’s more and more females coming in and the majority of the American public plays games, so past 60%. So, what’s changed in terms of how you release a game? How you market the game? How you get users interested in a game?

Alan: We founded the company in 2005. Back in those days, you’re still at the point where games were released in boxes. They went on store shelves. The first step in all those changes was really, well when selling games went digital, particularly, initially on the PC. And our title, Red Orchestra, was one of the first three non-Valve titles released on Steam, which became the predominant PC digital marketing platform.

Rudy: When you released Red Orchestra I guess it got a lot of buzz from winning?

Click here for the complete transcript: https://creativeouthouse.com/2019/08/28/alan-wilson-on-gaming-creating-and-fierce-customer-loyalty/

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