GGG Marketing Guy would love your ideas!

Partner up with known youtubers when possible. Also, Rock Paper Shotgun are awesome, and one of the few sites I read.

But mainly, an official Twitch channel, and do some proper and regular live dev streams there.

To give you a practical example, look at Warframe and Planetside 2, they have these regular dev streams on Twitch where community managers play the game, interview devs, do contests, all kinds of stuff, a friday night live kind of thing. It creates some buzz, and is also great for people playing the game to look at and feel the game is alive and evolving constantly. Could do builds of the week, short interviews with top players, other streamers.

I have a gut feeling that pushing standard PoE logo black T-shirts through dark-themed pop culture type outlets, such as Hot Topic, could provide some nice GGG and PoE awareness in America. If successful, other merchandise could possibly be considered, such as the PoE soundtrack, key-chains, female undergarments, etc. I would absolutely buy a T-shirt and soundtrack. If I had a girlfriend, she would be getting PoE underwear whether she liked it or not.

Also, I hear that search engine optimization is promising. If a search for "Deckard Cain" could yield a hit for PoE, that would be amazing. There are LOTS of potential search terms and phrases related to the Diablo series, among other ARPGs, that might suggest that PoE would be a relevant find to the searcher.

I don't read news about games much, unless I am doing a search for something specific through a search engine. So, I can't really help much with online marketing ideas. Personally, I hate online advertising, and it usually just annoys me. More times than not, I will right off a product or service that tries to hard to grab my attention through the Internet. If people want it, they will find it. If people are interested in related material to PoE, then hopefully they will find PoE when doing Internet searches for the related material, such as "Diablo Clone", "Stone of Jordan", "Windforce", "WoW", etc.

Also, if you could figure out what style of music is most popular as a percentage of the PoE player base, getting famous, or semi-famous, band members to sport your T-shirts in music videos or interviews would be killer. Like Corpse-grinder Fisher from Cannibal Corpse. If he was to wear a PoE shirt in an interview, PoE would be guaranteed some chunk of awareness from vulgarity loving metal-head gamers. Also, Meshuggah, they have a very loyal niche fan-base. With a little research, you might find that the general theme of Meshuggah is not so different from that of PoE, except they are a musical act. Still, they dominate, violate, punish, and shroud you in something that could be described as a dark exilation into nothingness. Part of me thinks that a Meshuggah/PoE ad campaign, or just a PoE plug within a Meshuggah interview, could be fruitful for GGG and the PoE franchise.

Get TB to do another video for the expansion, i know he loved PoE whilst it was in CB and has a certain amount of ire to throw at your competitors.

It seems to me that Path of Exile is most interesting to theorycrafters, players who like games which require extensive amounts of thought relative to action. These games are not necessarily computer games; Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering are both examples of long-lasting theorycrafter-gaming franchises which have stood for years. These are niche games, but so is Path of Exile.

Which means: those types of players are your primary market. Getting advertising banners on popular D&D and MtG forums, for example, would probably be a good idea. Physical card/D&D shops, on the other hand, seem like a harder market to penetrate, and likely not worth the effort.

Hearthstone is similar to Magic the Gathering, so (contrary to what an earlier poster said,) I believe it's important to maintain some type of relationship with Kripparrian. We understand he's primarily a Hearthstone streamer now, and that's okay, because it's no coincidence that Path of Exile players often enjoy Hearthstone... and vice versa. The occasional PoE plug on an otherwise Hearthstone stream is going to be good advertising for the game. I wouldn't make it a priority to bring Kripp back to full-time PoE streaming, but getting him to play a race every now and then would be a good idea.

Quite a few of the posts above mention specific sites where players get their gaming news. Theorycrafters go to a variety of sites for such information, but the key factor is: they normally delve deep enough into gaming meta and theory that they go to some kind of website like that. (In my case, I go to the Escapist.) I don't think hitting up any particular one of them is important, but blanket coverage of several key ones could be helpful. It might even do well to get a specific review in to some of these outlets where PoE has so far escaped notice. There is, however, some risk to the idea: getting the attention of influential, independent critics may draw bad press to the game (I have no trouble imagining Ben Croshaw going on a rant about how PoE was designed by retards).

Stay good to the community, I heard from this game through various sites like Reddit from other people who played it and loved it. Almost everything I learned came from streamers like Kripp who made videos daily explaining in-depth how to become a better player and how the game worked in great detail. Active daily streamers were definitely a major reason I didn't stop playing this game.

I think blindly throwing money at random ads isn't gonna do any good, people will simply spread the message themselves as long as they enjoy the game. Then you need people like streamers / really good racers to keep the game interesting and prevent people from quitting but rather motivating them to become better and learn more. Whenever I'm not in the mood to play I usually watch streams (watching people race).

There's a lot of potential for racing and (hopefully soon) PvP in the future. But it needs to become much bigger and louder, like tournaments, maybe GGG should actively start supporting dedicated streams. Once the whole racing / PvP scene starts to become big, you could get shoutcasters, this kind of stuff is wildly popular in many competitive games. Give bigger and better rewards, maybe even in the form of microtransactions, to motivate good racers to become even better. The more crazy their skills become, the more people will want to watch them. Just look at how popular stuff like speedrunning is, which is kind of similar to racing.

Anyway.. I think this whole racing/PvP thing could become huge, right now it's just "a side thing for fun" but there's so many ways you can go with it.

To OP: you want the game to stay popular, then get your Colleagues at GGG to start engaging players on hot button issues like having a new permanent league and removal of the magic find system that many players have been asking for. Also let them do periodic polls on the log in screen to find what players wants and what needs to change.

At the moment GGG is burying it's head in the sand and not even engaging players about their suggestions about game breaking issues. If the matter of standard league is not fixed with the introduction of a new permanent league then POE will start bleeding old players soon.

As for marketing, sometimes the best marketing is actually free. I found out about Path of Exile from a random youtube comment on a non-related game. There is power in word-of-mouth but it is a double edged sword. Unless the developers remove their head from the sand and start engaging players, word-of-mouth will cease or worse become negative.

Finally, don't mistake forum majority for player base majority. So if you want to find out about something, best way is to have them do a small periodic poll in the log-in screen of the game that could cover topics ranging from game mechanics to where they've heard of POE

I read eurogamer,. But I do like the idea of something like codes for cheap pets as a marketing gimmick. If you guys were more active with the build of the *week* it could make for a YouTube series. Promote build diversity and all that jazz.

Facebook sharing: one account (poe) can be linked to one fb account and be eligible for 1 share, the share gives you 50 mts pts

Have a sneak peak with exclusive content on Totalbiscuit's youtube channel. That will definitely get people hyped for the new content and introduce many new players to PoE.

It's also how I found about PoE initially. It was Chris playing through some new content with TB. I know each game TB plays ends up sending a few thousand players in that direction.

I usually learn about new games, or major updates, through Steam. I'm not as much into traditional video gaming as I used to be (especially not professionally: more anchored into social gaming), so I don't spend much time on gaming news related web sites. Outside of this site, the three other gaming-centered sites I regularly visit are GameFAQs (not so much the forums), Steam (including forums), and the Paradox forums.

I think your best (most efficient and cheapest) marketing tool is word of mouth from satisfied players. Well, actually, they don't even have to be satisfied. Bitching is PR, too. So keep people engaged, have some re-tweet contests, do something on Facebook (though I think they recently changed their policies concerning contests), send mail to your existing player base more frequently (since you never delete accounts, make use of that database -- some will whine, but the benefits will justify it), consider a "bring a friend" program (bit troublesome since people would make fake accounts, but maybe tie it to a level or a cash store purchase), and so forth.

The focus should be on getting new players. That's where all the potential is, but you know all of that, too. :)