Do mini-games really promote full titles effectively?With ever increasing competition to get the attention of potential customers in a noisy online ma

With ever increasing competition to get the attention of potential customers in a noisy online marketplace, publishing companies need to discover successful and cost effective methods of attracting attention to their titles and generate pre launch buzz. One such tactic is to port the DNA of a boxed title into a Flash Minigame, which can be distributed across hundreds of international games portals. It's a strategy that makes a lot of sense when you consider that the one-thing publishers know for a fact about their potential customers is that they enjoy playing games. By their very nature Flash Minigames are the workhorses of online marketing, attracting huge numbers of players by naturally encouraging your audience to virally distribute them throughout all the territories publishers need to sell the boxed product.

So with more publishers looking to the web as a platform for extending their game experiences here are the top 10 considerations we believe go towards creating a successful game based marketing campaign?

1. Extend the experience

When porting the DNA of your console game to an online space it’s important to remember that this audience engages with games in a different manner to console gamers. Casuals expect snackable experiences that provide quick bursts of entertainment. Look at your product and consider how the narrative could be extended in this style and also try to bring the online story back to the boxed experience by offering some download achievement based rewards through PSN or Live?

2. Don’t get hung up on the limitations of Flash

Be bold with your concepts of how your game could translate to the web, Casuals are a pretty sophisticated bunch and they’ll expect a branded Flash experience to be suitably different from the boxed product in the same way they'd expect a DS port of a game to be a stripped down version of a PS3 or Xbox format.

3. Condense the narrative

Your boxed game will be a highly complex and rich narrative with lots of threads and twists. A marketing minigame doesn’t really need explain the whole plot, it’s a teaser to encourage players to click through and find out more. Your minigame needs to leave players wanting more.

4. Kickstart conversations

A minigame provides a great opportunity to develop an online PR campaign to support the pre launch buzz of your boxed product. There are literally hundreds of sites, bloggers and news distributers looking to repurpose games news, You need to provide them with an interesting and relevant story about your minigame promoting your boxed game and watch your Google ranking rise as inbound links start increasing.

5. Make sure it’s a good game

This might sound obvious, but don’t expect millions of plays from a game you’re only willing to spend £5k on. There’s a huge amount of noise in the casual gaming space and to stand out amongst the thousands of homebrew developers releasing decent games and poor branded gaming experiences from traditional advertising agencies. As a games brand the Casuals expect publishers to release stand out minigames that reflects your own quality values.

6. Don’t include a manual

So you thought that you had a tough time with console gamers not reading instructions? Well prepare yourself for a whole world of pain with the Casuals! Most will move on if they don’t ‘get’ your game in the first seconds of play, but will also reject any form of game education that doesn’t meet their exacting entertainment requirements.

7. Keep it small

Please don’t release a full on 3D experience featuring incredible renders straight from your game that runs in an 800X600 window. It might look incredible played on your internal network on a pimped up games PC, but most of your audience wont have access to this kit and it will take hours to download, Unfortunately regardless of how cool your game thumbnail looks or respected your company is, a large proportion of your potential audience won’t bother waiting for the preloader to finish.

8. Stage size

Make sure you know what the industry standard stage sizes are and develop your game to them. Even in Flash it can be prohibitively expensive to resize a game once it’s been developed at and you’ve discovered that non of the games portals will host it and it your audiences processors are grinding to a halt due to the Flash plugin gorging all their computers resources.

9. Professional seeding

Lots of media buying companies will tell you they can seed their game, and will grab you a few hundred thousand plays at 10p per person. However game seeding is a very specialist area and you’ll only get good results with professional seeding from a company who has built a strong and trusted relationship with the games portals. The best possible results usually come from companies who build and seed the games themselves, as they can never use the excuse that the game was too weak to get decent traffic!

10. Install specialised game tracking

Most standard web tracking tools won’t be able to monitor a viral game as they rely on tracking content on a specific webpage, your minigame will be a truly portable applications and it’s essential for you to be able to see how many people are playing it. A good tracking system will provide you with data such as total plays, unique plays, dwell time, location based plays, referring sites, hosting sites as well as having the ability to include custom tags to monitor specific events to your minigame such as level complete events, submission of highscore or click through to your website, Don’t leave it to the last minute - Whilst creating a game in Flash isn’t as intensive as working for the PS3 or Xbox it does need a few weeks development time, and you’ll be grateful for having the opportunity to fine tune the experience, adding those final touches that make your minigame become a viral hit.

This article was originally printed in MCV in 2009