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

How to quit your job with style

A resignation letter delivered in a flash game from a developer at 2K Australia.

Kerb discover giant Lego man living on Brighton Beach

The phones at Kerb HQ have been ringing off the hook since Pete one of our project managers reported finding a 6ft tall Lego man on Brighton Beach yesterday. Ironically Lego are one of our clients, but we can't really take credit for this chap. If he wasn't so heavy he'd probably be living in our office right now :(

Local social

This week I've seen some interesting stuff happen on local social networks

1. A friend signs up to Facebook, joins a the Brighton and Hove community just in time to see an advert for a 24 hour party that's just finished at a flat she rents out.

2. I find an old friend on Facebook, and the day he accepts my request I notice one of his friends has lost her ipod. Earlier that day I got an email referencing a local flash developer newsgroup, pointing to a local blogger who had found an ipod. It turned out to be hers and it was returned this morning.

Both are good examples of how small local social networks can get interconnected by bigger networks and users experience the effect in a physical as well as virtual sense.

Productivity enhancements for OS X mail

I've always liked Mail because it's fast and reliable, but one of the jobs I've never got around to is pimping the interface to make it more usable - until now thanks to being inspired by this screenshot on Flickr.

The components used to create this set up are:

Mailtags - tagging messages and making them time sensitive
Letterbox - provides a three column layout

and lastly the use of smart mailboxes to give fast access to useful messages.

Let's talk about sex....

Pornography is generally hidden away from the sanitised statistics relating to web usage, but last October UK Internet users toppled pornography off it's throne of the most 'hit' UK content through their increasing use of search engines. This month in America where 13% of all web hits are to porn related sites and only 7% to search engines, social networking is about to do the same.

It's not surprising that these technologies are so successful as search and conversation have driven the Web 2.0 movement, but it is surprising that whilst the porn industry has historically embraced new distribution channels it only recently seems to have become interested in utilising social networks.

Moo cards

Moo is damn cool. They print 100 half size business cards on nice satin card using images from your Flickr account for £9.99. The best thing is you can have 100 different images on the cards with your own personalised contact details on the reverse.

Mojiti - Now with added editing

One of the pieces of technology I like demoing is a video sharing engine that can record video directly to the server via a webcam. Digital Natives don't get impressed by technology so easily these days, but offering such a simple video based contribution platform is very slick. My only issue with the end product is that the video created goes live unedited. As someone who has problems leaving answerphone messages in 'one take' I suffer trying shoot a few minutes of video.

However now Mojiti the company who produced the tool that allows YouTube users to add subtitles to their videos have updated their tool to allow video editing too. I really think this will revelutionise how we contribute video online and will drive video based blogging. Great timing for Video Blogging week

Speaking at Learning Technology

I ran a seminar at Learning Technology in London Olympia last week entitled 'Learning meets social networking' where I spoke about the influence that social networking can have on learning networks that don't offer collaborative environments. The crux of the presentation was around the fact that whilst most organisations understand the benefits of social networks I've found that many are nervous about implementing them on their own.

The presentation looked at how consumers are experiencing learning on demand via content distributed through social networks and how consumers can be split into groups that defines how naturally they engage with social technology.

I recalled the story of my friends daughter who was banned from using MSN on Christmas Day as her mother wanted her to commit to some 'real world interaction' with family and friends. By six PM she was finally allowed to go onto the network and I mistakenly presumed that none of her contacts would be online at that time on Christmas day. It not only transpired that over twenty of her contacts were online, but she had over three hundred contacts in total that she kept in reasonably regular contact with. This story was picked up the Korean news channel OhMyNews who felt rather sorry for her not being allowed to use MSN on Christmas day!

It wraps up with an example of how we produce learning material for organisations that don't want to commit themselves to providing networked learning communities, but do understand the need to engage all levels of learners with inspired content.

Here are the slides and will I'll try to put a v/o over it if I get a chance over the next few days.

Doctor Martens social faux pa

Dr Martens have just released their all flash social networking site freedm2 to beta. The site was created by Saatchi interactive and is an attempt to engage and connect with airware customers. Unsurprisingly the agency is not going to monetise the site, but are trying to change audience brand perception and monitor that change.

I was particularly interested in this project as it's a Flash based social networking site, which made me wonder why they'd chosen that particular delivery format. I was also interested to see if Saatchi had built the site in Flash 9 utilising the new engine to create a more engaging environment.

So after waiting for the first page load I trawled the source code to discover I was in a Flash 8 environment, so let's see what this site is going to do.

The first page provided a view of a grand Victorian London residential street. Why London I wonder, why not Newcastle or Manchester or even Wales? Are DM's target audience going to aspire to this capital grandeur or we're the creative team being a little London centric in their concept? My next mission was to click on the front door, which was really exciting and a loading icon popped up for a few seconds whilst the doorbells loaded. Here I had to register, which was a boring chore. DM wanted my email and my DOB for some reason, which I obviously lied about because I want to protect my identity.

So once I'd managed to navigate the flaky login process I was standing in a dishevelled and dreary hallway looking at a grand staircase, a door and a lift. Clicking on the areas allowed me to access the different zones. Cue another loading icon.

I chose to move upstairs and was presented with a dizzying horizontal scrolling array of weird doors, most of which I couldn't access. Clicking madly to get out of this disorientating environment I end up watching another loading screen until I'm presented with another shabby room. Here I can click on a picture that is apparently a video but it won't play. At this point I notice a new Icon appear on the screen and click on it. I think this is another visitor, but I only seem to be able to contact him via email and am now stuck in this interface. Every time I do anything on this site I have to watch the loading screen crawl up to 100%

So I go back downstairs and try the lift, but it's broken, click on a notice board that’s full of dummy Lorum Ipsum text. I try my last option, which is a door that leads to a cinema. And here the lameness of this site becomes truly apparent when they try to provide a youTube experience. The graphics are really nice as you'd expect from Saatchi but the interface design is weak and the technology is woeful. I wonder if the video content was created by the Saatchi creative team after a long lunch in the pub, most of it wouldn't load and crashed after a few seconds. I notice the audience in the cinema throwing stuff at the screen, and wish I could join in.

As I was trying to leave the house to get a screenshot of the outside for this article I found the music room hidden away in the hallway. Now this space has some pretty big ideas, offering the ability to create your own music using pre-supplied sample loops on a timeline. Now this is obviously where a lot of the budget has gone, and I'm amazed by how poor the system is, it just doesn't work. Stuff won't load the interface is terrible, and the samples are as dreary and dull as the visual environment.

Saatchi claim that this site is in Beta, but I wouldn't have even shown it to the client never mind opened the doors to the public. This is not Beta, this is not social networking, it's is a pretty design that's out of touch with it's audience's aspirations with a shabby backend that makes me wonder what sort of idiot DM thinks I am to spend my valuable time on this worthless website.

My recommendation to DM is to ditch this site, create a social space that really focuses on what their brand essence is. How about a video library of underground punk gigs from the 70's, a photo library of street fashion through the ages, a tool to design your own DM shoes and boots. Brands need to reinforce their essence through content not devalue it.


Tags: Doctor Martens Saatchi Social brand AgencyFreedm2

Accessibility is law

Well in America at least you can be sued under the Americans with disabilities act if your website doesn't allow people with visual disabilities to read the content through a screen reader. The Target group was the first organisation to fall foul of this ruling.

I was at the d.construct conference in Brighton last week and Derek Featherstone gave a very interesting talk on accessibility issues in the web 2.0 world. He based his 45 minute presentation on the problems caused by the simplest form input field inputs such as login and search, which you can imagine is only the very tip of the accessibility iceberg.


Tags: Web2.0 Accessibility Target brand d.construct

RSS feeds for business

This article has a couple of interesting case studies on how organisations have used RSS Feeds to assist the flow of information internally as well as externally.