Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Cheese Knife +2

The Internet's Worst Landing Page EVER belongs to Flyff (the name says it all)

Here's the ad in-situ on GameSpot:

I wasn't too impressed with the ad. If I didn't make a living in this industry, I probably would have ignored it. But it does its job.

"Flyff: Fly for fun"

"Free to play"

Can't really get a softer sell than that. If you're a pushover and were so inclined, what would you get when you clicked?

Well you'd run into this:

Meet the Flyff campaign landing page.

I recommend clicking the image I have here and taking a closer look. You'll see three major elements to the page. To the upper right is a half-nude child/woman with a gigantic cheese knife. Ok.

To the upper left resides the logo and instructions to get started. "Play for Free in Three Easy steps", it says. "Steps", apparently, is not a word important enough to capitalize. By the way, if you're interested, the steps actually take you off the landing page, wherein you lose the nice "three easy" part of the whole matter. Also, in an attempt to show you what the game is about, a video trailer is available to view. Sweet! ....But you have to leave the landing page. Oh yeah, don't bother with the trailer, it shows grainy demo footage that I'm sure someone at one point used to get more funding.

But wait a second, let's not rush into things. Who the hell are you and why should I go down three easy steps with you?..... Ahh there we go, the last part of the page: "What is Flyff?" I'm so glad you asked, anticipating I'd ask. How clever of you.

Blah blah, yadda yadda, it's a flying game? An MMORPG flying game? I'm so confused. Can you tell me more?

"Problem with Registration?"

No, not really. I'm not really ready to commit yet. I was trying to find out about your game. Besides, I'm still trying to figure out if "Launched the game and log-in to play!" is grammatically correct. And can you tell me why your girl/woman's sword has feathers wings on one side and dragon wings on the other?

Hey, for the sake of argument, let's assume I was ready to register, what are these "problem" you speak of?

"Your username must be all lowercase, and may only contain letters and numbers"
"Since you only have three hours from when you create the account to activate it, the account has most likely already been deleted."
"There is currently a bug where you cannot have anything except letters, numbers, and spaces in your address."

Oh, those problems eh? Those sound more like your problems than mine. First, you probably want a system that can read capitalized letters. I promise not to use "steps", I know how you don't look fondly upon it. Second, you really shouldn't try to limit me to three hours, I type real slow and it takes me a while to understand you. Third, that's a bug and you really should fix it.

Boy, you guys have problems. First, you're seriously making a bad name for Korean games. I guess this does explain why you guys haven't taken over the US market. But hey, I do applaud you guys for attempting a landing page. I guess someone told you it's a best practice in online advertising. Did they actually tell you how to make one? You see, the landing page is supposed to make someone WANT to play your game. Let me help you. Here's a few tips:

  • Screenshots - Get rid of Miss Cheese
  • Three Easy Steps that are actually easy and contained within the landing page. Is it so tough to redirect your links to this page?
  • Imbed the video, YouTube can help you with that.
  • Tell me about the actual game. Telling me I can flying around in your MMORPG is not describing your product.
  • For god's sakes, find someone who has taken at least one (I don't ask for much) college-level English course to look over your page.
  • Go easy on the "free", no one likes a slut.
  • Don't ever show your dirty laundry on your landing page, there's plenty of time for me to discover that myself.
Good luck Flyff.

No comments: