One thing that is puzzling me this week is the viral campaign of Minecraft; word of mouth is everywhere and I can't figure out why exactly. The developer (Notch) started taking pre-orders in June 2009 and has racked up over 4,200 units sold at $13 a pop ($26 at retail time) and the game is still in Alpha. 
It's a cool little game and all, but it really offers no real goals, no campaigns, no mechanics...not much of anything other than a rudimentary engine with little to do (being a true sandbox game, though). I ask myself how this came to be other than some sort of user-generated viral campaign to spread the word. The one thing I realized is that they offer no demo of the flagship Alpha product and the free version they do offer is an old, stripped down pre-Alpha version which has long been abandoned by the developer. Perhaps this is a "Draw & Charge" tactic that lures folks to the site and gets them to blindly invest in the product...perhaps it's a legion of 11 year olds that love pixelated, blocky graphics...perhaps people are getting Mario flashbacks playing with those cubes for hours, who knows. One thing is certain, though; their fans are generating a lot of buzz on the Internet and it finally crossed my path last night in my travels.
I'm not promoting that product in this post as it's nowhere near finished and has no common elements with AI War (other than it's on Windows), but the phenomenon that interests me is this viral campaign it seems to be enjoying and I wonder how it all got started. I think we can all help a little bit in our own ways, but I think what we are talking about here is attempting to break into the mainstream media for a little bit of hard earned exposure cause AI War definitely has the meat to compete successfully with anything out there.
I'll tell you, it's constantly on Facepunch, somethingawful.com and 4chan's video games board, known as "/v/" or The Vidya.
People like it, promote it. More people see it, buy it like it... It's obvious how viral works. However, it's not really a campaign, it's more of a loop. Notch doesn't have to do much (anymore).
The way this was started is that Notch himself visits some of those sites.
Here's some proof, taken from
Notch's own twitter
(SA is referring to Something Awful and that !! and string of numbers and letters is a secure tripcode, a way for users to be securely identified rather than remaining anonymous on 4chan.)
People like this level of developer-gamer interaction. It also allows gamers to give direct feedback to the developers, especially on /v/, as the post rate is very high with it ebbing one of 4chan's most popular boards.
I doubt it's 11 year olds, although with the goons (somethingawful users) the age is questionable. I know that there has been an Let's play AI War: Fleet Command done by SA and
Facepunch users. This is good, some of the members know of it.
There are also AI War players on /v/ (I'm one of them and I know there are a few more, mainly because I gifted it to them). Speaking of myself, I do attempt to push AI war on my friends and almost anyone who mentions RTS games on /v/.
This is good, you've got the seeds of a viral campaign here. What's required is some of that developer-gamer interaction.
