Evony Update
As the gaming-community awaited the latest release for the evony game (evony age ii), the developers and other parts of the web community didn’t expect the strong and consistent competition offered by innogames’ grepolis game which continues to gain momentum in the MMORTS gaming field.
Innogames decided a few months back to bring the predominantly german-language based game ‘Grepolis’ based in Ancient Greece and playing along the lines of a free web-based civilization clone – to the english speaking world.
A smart move indeed.
But many felt with the giant killing Evony game so popular and grabbing gamers from all over the web, that Grepolis wouldn’t be able to attract enough users to make it a viable, money-earning game.
How wrong they were.
Similar to what evony did with their web ads, Innogames did just the same – and have smartly placed Grepolis adverts on the net in strategic positions and attracted a good amount of grepolis signups and a massive proportion of those gamers are ’staying’ as in logging into to grepolis and playing regularly.
The real test comes now, with Evony releasing their long awaited sequel. Dubbed Evony Age 2, its a massive roll-out expansion for the original evony game – new graphics, new items, smarter design and an even better gaming-interface will have experienced and long-term gamers coming back for more and possibly newbies could be flocking to evony to check things out for the first time.
Most have expected a ramped up evony ad-campaign, but this is only now gathering momentum.
It will be interesting to see the free online game stakes in say 2 months time, will Grepolis and Evony have cornered the market?
Will the giant gaming houses like Blizzard move to add to their wow (world of warcraft stables) and develop a free web type scenario for the game (a cut down non-subscription version, where possible game-coin purchases are allowed)?
We wait with interest! Or will a new MMO shoot out of the blue to give us an even greater offering? Perhaps a cool strategy based shooter developed for the free web game community. The future certainly looks good!
