Evony sites3/22/2023 ![]() Sure, it will garner attention and some hardcore sim players like sex, too (hard to believe I know), but those looking for sexual content are going to look away pretty quickly from this game, which ostensibly intends to make money on in game purchases made to enhance this otherwise freeware style of game. In that regard, I really don’t understand how the PR minds that are pushing Evony expect to maintain a player base for this game when it simply isn’t offering what it’s advertising. However, unlike Tomb Raider or Wet, Evony is a less than sexy game. ![]() If Wet contains some sexy images, well, it is game that is in part about the topic of sex. Indeed, as I observed in my recent review of Wet, the game is in part interested in sexuality as it emerges in the exploitation cinema stylistics that it apes. However, I would not ever claim that either Lara or Rubi are not highly sexualized characters in games that in part are selling themselves on that sexuality. I just published a piece last week about “The Bodies of Lara Croft and Rubi Malone” that in part defended the representations of these female protagonists of the Tomb Raider series and Wet. What I am trying to get at here is that while a lot of games try to sell themselves on sexual content, those games usually also contain some element of sexual content. As the information that Arkenor’s article suggests, Evony is a simulation game in the tradition of Civilization, a fairly hardcore economic management and combat simulation that has no clear connection beyond a medieval theme (and that theme does not even emerge in all of its ads anyway) to the game itself. With that bit of warning concerning the potentially less obvious aspects of the possible shadiness of Evony aside, though, I am frankly still just baffled by the way that Evony has been sold to gamers. Nic, a writer for The Big Critique web site, makes similar claims that “this game ripped off its graphics and descriptions from other games includes new software that raises privacy issues.” Additionally, Arkenor notes that a piece of software called iEvony that is downloadable from the Evony web site “just wants all your instant messenger login details so it can send messages to people on your behalf.” He suggests that this is part of Evony‘s additional layers of less overt viral marketing. In one of the rare reviews about the gameplay itself over at the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming news site, Ark’s Ark, a columnist called Arkenor has observed that Evonycontains in game text that bears a suspicious similarity to the text of games from the Civilization series. I should mention, though, too, that a lot of this attention has drawn some charges against Evony that go beyond mere marketing issues. The advertising may be selling itself rather than the product. That the game has had much less virtual ink spilled about the game itself, however, may indicate the campaign’s relative lack of success at getting folks to actually play the game. I suppose that the fact that Evony has generated as much conversation about its ads as it has does indicate that at least the ads themselves have been successful in getting the game some attention and that it is probably largely related to its extremely straightforward and audacious “sex sells” mentality. ![]() I should note that a number of other folks have spilled a fair amount of virtual ink on the topic of Evony and its marketing. Things such as text from Civilization 4 to the castle sprites from Age of Empires have been found in the game, creating the feeling for some users that this developer, whoever it is, is not entirely on the legitimate side.Which brings me to the weirdly sexed up and, what appears to me to be, the overly simplistic and badly marketed Evony campaign. ![]() The company may have more to worry about than just poor taste in marketing, as many sites are also noting that the game's art assets and writing assets have been ripped from other real-time strategy games. Interestingly enough, the company has denounced the use of spam amongst their users of the iEvony codes, calling it a "unethical" and "abusive." Since then, the name has changed and new advertising has appeared, including an overuse of blog comment spam. During that time the company was caught by bloggers for stealing images without permission from other sites and using them for their game's marketing. The game's unorthodox marketing strategy has been a target of the blogosphere for some time, starting back when they were still called Civony instead of their current title. The game is a medieval MMORTS, but you probably wouldn't be able to figure that out from some of their recent advertisements, most of which center around lingerie and women. If you've been on the internet for longer than five minutes then you've probably run into ads for Evony, an online free-to-play browser real-time strategy game. ![]()
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