High Fidelity Is Spending a Lot of Money to Entice New Users: Will the Strategy Work?

Well, High Fidelity is certainly throwing around the money lately to promote their social VR platform and encourage users to join. On February 7th, HiFi is hosting its next BINGO EXTREMO event:

BINGO EXTREMO is back with an exciting 2019 update!

Everyone is a contestant at this VR game show with huge prizes and cash up for grabs.

The more contestants play, the bigger the prizes will be… so invite your friends. How BIG can you win? Prizes start at $350 but could go up to $1,200* every round, depending on the number of participants. Register for the event to get an extra $200 if you win.

The Prizes

Every round, you could win an Oculus Rift, HTC Vive HMD, or substitute prizes for cash*. Once you have a bingo, choose between the mystery doors for a randomized loot. 

High Fidelity is best experienced in Virtual Reality. Join in Desktop mode and score a state-of-the-art VR system for your home, or choose to walk away with cash.

* all cash paid in High Fidelity Coin

It would appear that High Fidelity is, for now, abandoning its monthly stress testing and replacing it with events with big cash prizes.

Now keep in mind that you can still withdraw your HFC winnings via the Bank of High Fidelity (the exchange rate is fixed at 100 HFC = 1 USD). Contrast this with Linden Lab, who recently announced that it would no longer allow prize and contest winnings of Sansar dollars to be exchanged into US dollars. They are forcing people with what they call “non-earned currency” to spend it all within Sansar.

And that’s not all. High Fidelity is also paying out money to people who promote their upcoming BINGO EXTREMO event on social media. Check out this recent post to Twitter:

Now, obviously, Philip Rosedale and his team at High Fidelity have decided that they are going to spend some money to build brand recognition. It remains to be seen, however, whether this strategy will pay off (pun intended) in the long run. Linden Lab is taking a much more cautious, hands-off approach to promotion—at least, so far (perhaps they have something up their sleeve?).

It will be interesting to compare events between High Fidelity and Sansar this year. Only time will tell if spending lavishly on promotions (and appealing to people’s greed) will lead to more users, and more importantly, more return users.

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2 thoughts on “High Fidelity Is Spending a Lot of Money to Entice New Users: Will the Strategy Work?”

  1. I was initially worried that High Fidelity was promoting itself beyond what the platform was actually ready for, and in some cases that’s still true. They are, however, also hard at work listening to user feedback, fixing bugs & implementing feature requests as quickly as their team can manage.

  2. If only they’d spend that money on adding the features that would actually bring creators in…

    Bribing people into participating isn’t going to keep creators in the community. It’ll just bring in a few opportunists (if even that) who won’t stick around. The kind of people that come in, get their dough, and leave as soon as they came.

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