Advergaming with Doritos

Doritos launched a few years ago one fictitious Hollywood studio named Snack Strong Productions. The main idea of the studio is to promote the brand with some ludic interfaces like Internet games, interactive stories on YouTube, video games and viral campaigns.

A successful case of the fictitious studio is the game named Doritos Crash Course (Wanako Games, 2010). The game is a 2.5D side scrolling plat-forming advergame developed for the Xbox 360's Live Arcade service. It is free for download and has an awesome and intuitive interface.

Crash Course has two good features to highlight: first of all, the game is an experience sponsored by Doritos and the brand appears in the beginning of each stage. The second important feature is the in-game advertising possibility inside some floating outdoors in the game interface. As you can see in the image below, the outdoor is displaying an ad for Crash Course 2 (the second game of the franchise) and it supports many kinds of advertising.



The social strategy is very important here and players with an Xbox Live membership may compare records with friends or play head-to-head against online opponents.

Doritos is investing heavily in business strategies with entertainment. Definitely, the brand seems to have understood how to adapt itself to the ludic context that permeates our contemporary world.

Money through mobile games

As you know, I’m a postgraduate research student and graduation level teacher in Brazil. At this moment, I’m teaching Digital Media and Gaming Concepts to my students. In a specific class about mobile gaming there’s question that comes up every semester: “How can we make money through mobile games?”

Ok, the world is going mobile and everybody wants to create the new Angry Birds to become a millionaire, but it’s essential to analyse some important business models inside this complex (and gigantic) market. In this post I just want to highlight some of these models. It is not my intention to write a complete document about this subject.



1. Freemium (a neologism mixing “free” and “premium”): is a business model by which a game is provided free of charge, but money is charged for advanced features, functionalities, or virtual goods. “Cut the rope” is an example of freemium game because you can download the content and play ten stages of the game, but if you want the complete experience its mandatory to pay. “Zombie Tsunami” is an example of how a company can make money with in-game equipment (players are invited to visit a virtual shop to buy scenarios, powers, clothes, etc. with real credits).

2. Ads and banners: there are a lot of free games with advertising inside its interface. It’s very common to find a free game with ads/banners in the screen. Sometimes it sucks but someone needs to pay the price and advertising could be an answer.

3. In-Game Advertising: refers to the use of digital games as a medium for the delivery of advertisements. This is a better way to put products and services in the interface. We have a lot of examples of brands that created games for its products, like “CP3K” running game from Nike.

4. Free for long-term profit: a good strategy for small companies in the beginning of its existence is to give the whole game for free or put the game for free for a while and put a minimum price on it after a few weeks. In the beginning it’s necessary to build a name in the mobile gaming field. If your first game was good, certainly people will pay for expansions or new ones.

5. Put a price on it: there’s no rule about a price for a mobile game. In this case it’s important to have an overview about similar games to create a coherent value to your game.

There’s a lot of another strategies to create “talkability” and make your game to go viral. It’s possible to distribute promotional numbers for free downloads to influent people, use social media, etc. but this is a subject for another post.

Now on to your opinion.

Made for Play: Board Games & Modern Industry

Excellent content. Brilliant documentary. One master piece about the board games industry in Europe.



Jettingen Germany is home to Ludo Fact, one of the world's largest manufacturers of board and card games.

This documentary shows how a board game makes the leap from an idea to your table. You'll see every aspect of the manufacturing process: the technology and machines, the many detailed steps, and the hundreds of people that are involved in the production of a single game.

Mostly, we hope the film gives you a greater appreciation of the time, effort and investment that goes into every quality board game that makes it to the marketplace and your home. The business of fun requires a lot of hard work!

For more information on The Spiel and our media coverage of the game playing world, visit thespiel.net

Game industry & fans

The global game industry is a colossal and powerful juggernaut. There's nothing new about it. The world video-gaming industry is predicted to record 9% yearly growth through 2013, to exceed $76 billion, according to the site Report Linker. Yes, there's a great amount of money and a wide industry such that requires strategies to engage consumers with more and more meaningful experiences.

It seems that game publishers need to understand how to create characters, challenges, sequences, rewards and a wide chain of derivative products to transform players into fans. A fan is an important piece in the contemporary culture for many entertainment brands.



A fan is a person who is enthusiastically devoted to something, such as a band, a sports team or a entertainer. Fans have a special role inside the enormous game industry. A community of fans that surrounds a specific game becomes a fandom, and this audience deserves special attention.

A well-structured fandom could be an effective marketing tool for a game publisher, so good as advertising in television. Companies must understand how to motivate the fandom audience with meaningful experiences and how to bring the player to its side.

As Jenkins (2006, p.148) says, successful media producers are becoming more adept to monitoring and serving audience interests. The game industry, which sees itself as marketing interactive experiences rather than commodities, has been eager to broaden consumer participation and strengthen the sense of affiliation players feel towards their games.

In a big business like this, companies must understand games as well as understand marketing.

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Reference:

JENKINS, Henry. Fans, bloggers and gamers: exploring participatory culture. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

The relationship among achievements, rewards, and power

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Source:

ADAMS, Ernest. Fundamentals of Game Design. New Riders: 2009. p.385

Games and simulations

Few weeks ago I participated of a discussion about important features in game design process. Among a lot of important topics, there is one that deserves special attention and asks for a highlight -- I'm talking about the idea of "simulation" in games.

It’s very common to read in some articles a few notions about this subject, but I think it's important to bring one conceptual definition to this discussion. First of all, we are talking about digital games and, in second place, all games are simulations by nature.



Becker and Parker, in their excellent book The guide to computer simulation and games say (2012, p.64) that in the computer simulation community all games are simulations, but not vice versa. If one looks at the algorithms of a fully digital game (i.e., one that is not a digital version of a traditional game) – those algorithms that actually make it behave the way it does – one will find that they are in fact simulations. While it is certainly true that most games have some aspects that classical simulations normally lack, that does not make them something other than simulations.

The quote above helps us to imagine this idea clearly. The programming code per se is a simulation tool that gives life to the game and to its interface, mechanics and dynamics.

The authors also state that (p.65), at least until recently, simulations did not normally involve the use of joy-sticks or other game-like control devices. Nowadays, we are seeing more and more simulation engines being built to take advantage of those very same devices.

In other words, the simulation field is getting wider and their practices have acquired new meanings every time. And it's even hard to say how much the games and features related to the idea of simulation affect areas beyond entertainment.

I think it’s necessary to understand better these different features to use games in a broader way. To initiate a deeper discussion I recommend the book listed in the reference of this post below.

Have a nice reading.

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Reference:

BECKER, Katrin; PARKER, J.R. The guide to computer simulations and games. John Wiley & Sons: Indianapolis, 2012.

Puzzles

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite ludic genres: puzzles. Puzzles are a good format to structure interesting choices in your games.

Puzzle games, by definition, focus on logical and conceptual challenges, although occasionally the games add time-pressure or other action-elements.



We have pure puzzle games like Tetris (by the way, Tetris is credited for revolutionizing gaming and popularizing the puzzle genre), Bejeweled and Dungeon Raid. We also have a hybrid format that mixes puzzles with another gaming genres, as we can see in God of War and Resident Evil (action + puzzle). It seems that a balance between action and puzzle is a great way to structure a good narrative/gameplay to your game.

Fullerton says (2008, p.324) that puzzles are also a key element in creating conflict in almost all single player games. There is an innate tension in solving the puzzle. They can contextualize the choices that players make by valuing them as moving toward or away from the solution.

Ernő Rubik, the Hungarian architect and creator of the magic cube, said a long time ago that “the problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life, our whole life is about solving puzzles”.

Inside the puzzle genealogy we have many different examples: textual puzzles, puzzles with numbers, visual/color puzzles and much more.

I’m studying some puzzle logics for a new iPhone game design project. Soon, I want to share some impressions and sketches about the game with my readers.

Now on to your opinion.

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Reference:

FULLERTON, Tracy; SWAIN, Christopher; HOFFMAN, Steven. Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008.