Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the Social Gaming Summit in London. Sadly I could only make day one due to clashing conferences (details on the UX course in a forthcoming post) but I did still get to see a number of insightful and thought provoking panels. And one that made me angry.
Day one featured
- 3 great talks (Francis, Wong and Lovell)
- A panel on funding which while interesting was sadly irrelevant to me
- An incredibly depressing panel on distribution (especially if you were a small start-up)
- An important, but oh so dull, talk on the steps you need to think about when planning your game marketing
- A disappointing keynote that proved the importance of always accompanying a marketer with an engineer
- And finally a talk on integrating brands via narrative that practically had me jumping out of my seat and yelling (fortunately for those around me I restrained the impulse, though twitter got a hint of my fury)
The highlight of the day was Nicholas Lovell's talk '26 Minutes: 26 Ways to Make Money from Your Game', which managed to be both entertaining and useful, packing in a remarkable amount of material into just half an hour. There was way too much to list here, but to pick a few choice tips:
- You need to think about ARM (Acquisition, Retention and Monitisation) across your ecosystem. Most companies are okay on A and M but fall down badly on R.
- 0-1-100. Make most of your content/game free. Make it really easy to spend $1. Provide a way for big spenders to spend $100.
- Time is the main asset, not currency. Numerous games let you do things where you have to wait a day or longer for the result, but pay and you can get the result instantly
- Let the user decide when to come back, but it’s okay to penalise if they renege on their promise
- Free means free
- And many, many more….
Celia Francis, CEO of WeeWorld (a social network for teens in the States. Go on, watch it again) clearly knows her stuff (except when asked about moderation). WeeWorld continually experiment with different revenue models for different content and on different platforms, constantly looking to optimise. One of the great things they've learned to do that start-ups simple can’t is to cross sell, pushing from every app to every other app. They've also found a fun and inoffensive way to integrate brands: allow players to purchase branded virtual products and clothes just like standard WeeWorld virtual purchases.
Brian Wong is only 20 years old, is CEO of kiip, and clearly sees himself as a new Steve Jobs. He's certainly got the energy and charisma, with a talk all about emotion. Appropriately, what he lacked in concrete data he made up for with case studies and, most importantly, passion. We need to create and leverage emotional moments, even if it’s the simple satisfaction of completing a level in a game. He was very careful to separate achievements from reward, talking of the delight a player can experience when offered a surprising reward at the point of achievement, the moment when they are most open to brand promotion. He's clearly promoting his own company, but the notion of finding emotional moments in your game/app/campaign resonates strongly.
The panel on distribution strategy (Chahine, Goodman, Laughlin, Pearce, Van Dreunen and Terrill) managed to bring the whole room down with the near unanimous verdict that virality on Facebook is dead. If you want people to find your game, you’re going to have to buy them with ads at $.50-$1.50 a pop, a price they expect to keep rising. Even the moderator (Bret Terrill), trying to throw a bone of hope to the audience, could only manage to say there were some exceptions that have succeeded on virality alone, but these are extremely rare. Admittedly all the panel held positions at companies that would be keen to deter up and coming competitors, but there's a definite ring of truth to their view of virality on Facebook.
As an aside, best put down of the day goes to Bret Terrill, who took a question from the audience near the end of this panel on how mobile would allow better targeting of users because the user base was more niche (question from a mobile games maker of course). Bret calmly pointed out that mobile is in somewhat more widespread use than Facebook, much to the delight of us nearby.
I'll skip the panel on investment (Gardner, Hebel, Helioui, Paanamen, Lovell) as it's not particularly relevant to me or brands and instead move straight on to Lloyd Melnick's talk on 'Beyond Performance Marketing: Survival Tips for Social Gaming Publishers'. And quickly back off it. It's not that the topics covered (the steps you needs to take in planning your campaign) aren't important, but my god was it dull. There was little insight, and the whole thing felt like a reading from a text book. I'm not saying it was terminally boring and sent half the room to sleep, but I may or may not have pen holes in my leg from trying to stave off narcolepsy.
This brings is to the last talk of the day, and the one that unleashed by inner Hulk (it’s not easy being green). 'Integrating Brands Into Social Game Narratives' by Dan Mayers. Advertised as a talk on how to organically integrate brands into social games through the use of narrative, we were instead subjected to a 45min advert for a football player simulator that managed to insult the work of a number of game writers, insult its players, and insult the audience.
Things got off to a bad start when Mayers commented that console games didn't/couldn't do personalised narrative. Hmm, I wonder what the writers and players of Deux Ex (10+ years old), Mass Effect (1,2 and 3), Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Skyrim and many, many more think of that.
Then we saw the in-game footage. A virtual goods shop full of Nike shoes and a live action video of your character arriving in "Niketown". Then came the scene with your agent and a 3 minute discussion of the new Alfa Romeo you’re going to get, complete with POV shot of staring at a magazine spread of said car. Then followed an even longer clip set in the Alfa Romeo showroom. Subtle this ain't. I haven't seen product placement this bad since the infamous "Omega" scene in Casino Royale, and this made that look like it was scripted by Robert Towne (Chinatown Towne, not MI:2 Towne. Jeez that was a bad script). Needless to say, if I was playing this I’d have quit within minutes and left with a bad taste of the featured brands in my mouth.
Finally came the insult to the audience. These video clips kept coming. And coming. And coming. At this point I was contemplating sawing my own leg off in order to have something to beat the speaker with. There was no insight. No exploration of different approaches. No answer to how you could possibly afford the combination of an always on social game with live action *personalised* video in the long term. Now the game itself might be great, but pretty much all we saw of it was an onslaught of video that spent the majority of its running time trying to sell me something. If I wanted to sit through 45 mins of ads for 5 mins of content I'd watch the X Factor. In the end the style of presentation matched the game itself: a repetitive, hard sales pitch empty of ideas and full of product at the expensive of story.
Was I glad I went to this talk? Hell yeh. It reminded me how passionate I am about games and narrative, and how important it is to get it right. There is a place for brands in games but you have to do it carefully and you have to make it genuinely organic. It's not impossible.
All in all, a great day.
In a flagrant attempt to generate some actual comments here, what examples do you think there are of organic brand integration, viral player growth, and/or emotional engagement in games?
