Mortal Kombat. A lesson in fan service

I love following the marketing of video game releases as they are some of the purest forms of advertising. You have a very defined market, established brands/IP and a huge pool f assets to call on. Oh and you have REAL FANS. Not the kind of fans who occasionally drink or eat your product but people who wear your brand, get tattoo of your brand and basically LOVE your brand. And for those looking for best practice in "social media" look no further than video games. The developers and publishers live and ie by their fans and go to great lengths to "service" them daily. What caught my gamer eye today was Mortal Kombat. A game that is banned here in Australia. Mortal Kombat is about to release the 9th (yes 9th! since debuting in 1992) game in the series next week and they have rolled out the big guns. A cosplay/casting video of their 3 female characters for no other reason than to give the male gamers something to fap about. I present Sonya, Mileena and Kitana. They will be at launch events taking photos with the fans all over Europe. The videos all push to the Facebook page to vote but in my book they all win. And if that wasn't enough how about a live action web series from Machinima for thos who like a little more back story Here's the trailer and the first episode. Just a fraction over 4 million views in a week. And not one article in any ad press about this "viral" success story. Mortal Kombat is not bulletproof like the Call of Duty series so the marketing teams has to work much harder to build the buzz and I think for this game they have done everything right. The game looks great, the amount of content produced to promote the game is astounding (just check the Youtube channel and FB page)