Trion Worlds sends me a cool promotional email, hits a customer service high note

I woke up this morning to a pretty cool email in my Inbox from Trion Worlds. Trion, for those unfamiliar, is an MMORPG publisher with a pretty decent stable of games. In addition to current mega-hit Trove, they also developed/manage/administrate ArcheAge, Rift, Atlas Reactor, and Defiance.

Although I somehow missed the news, it seems that last week Trion Worlds bought all of the assets of Gazillion Games, the company that went ka-blooey after losing their Disney license late last year, taking Marvel Heroes Online along with it. As I had actually spent a bit of money on Marvel Heroes (which I almost never do with free-to-play games), I was sad to see it go.

A bit of online poking revealed that Trion purchased Gazillion’s assets primarily to get their hands on the Marvel Heroes engine (officially, the deal includes “all Gazillion licenses, trademarks, patents and domains, in addition to its library of games”), which could be used as basically a short-cut for developers looking to produce isometric MMORPGs. Trion Worlds is making a bid to expand their presence even further into the MMO space, providing developers with tools to develop and publish a wide variety of games.

“We‘ve built an amazing ecosystem in support of our games and those we’ve published. We’re excited to add more tools to our library in order to embolden our teams and partners to create truly fantastic games,” said Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman, in an interview with GamesBeat “Our suite of vital technology and experience in publishing and operation at a global scale allows us to provide essential ‘ecosystem as a service’ support, empowering developers from all over the world to create all new AAA online experiences, sustain their studios in very crowded markets, and take more creative risks.”

Since I had an account with Trion (probably from some early dalliance with Defiance), and I also had an account with Gazillion, and Trion was smart enough to filter those two lists against each other, I landed on a mailing list for the above-mentioned cool email.

I was amazed at the customer-service savvy that Trion Worlds displayed in this email.  Take a gander:

“Hi there, folks.  You may have noticed the news this week about Trion Worlds picking up the assets of Gazillion Entertainment.

“We want to let you know about this since you already have a Trion Worlds account registered to the same email as your Gazillion account. As a heads up: We’re not going to send you a ton of emails about this – This is the only one about that news that you’ll get. 

“It’s important to us that your gaming decisions be yours and yours alone, so we’re not signing you up for anything automatically or anything like that.

“As a previous Gazillion customer, you’re invited to grab a free welcome pack to any one of our games RIGHT HERE.

“On behalf of the whole team at Trion Worlds, we all wish you a satisfying and successful gaming future, wherever you choose to play.

- Scott Hartsman

CEO, Trion Worlds”

There are so many ways this communication could have gone wrong. But Trion Worlds hit all of the points I want to hear. “Here’s the news. We won’t bug you anymore. We aren’t signing you up for anything. Now here’s some free stuff.”

By not attempting to build the Trion Worlds brand in this email, Trion Worlds have made me a fan of Trion Worlds. How about that?

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to redeem my Trove Super Starter + Square Necessities pack. Been meaning to check that game out.