A unique and more cost-effective way to make a social game viral.

In my earlier articles, I have noted how Facebook is become a very expensive and unstable platform for advertising social games. A lot of Indie game developers opted out of Facebook because it was just too expensive to market a game on the social network and the returns did not justify the investment.

There are many reasons here. Facebook lacks an app store like Apple’s popular platform and because of this, it’s hard to gain visibility on Facebook. And Facebook has become notorious for changing its policies as well as its designs to better satisfy its users and not the developers. And of course, everyone has heard of the special favors it grants companies like Zynga.

Anyways, my article here is more about a different method of making your game viral on Facebook. I am not here to criticize Facebook (which I do regularly).

Here is an abstract of this idea. Instead of paying Facebook or other ad companies to advertise your game (Facebook Ads, Interstitial ads etc), What if you PAID THE PLAYER directly to advertise your game?

I know a lot of companies would think, “Well, there are legal limitations here, paying a customer in cash or rewards is hard because we will have to ask for their personal information to make the payment, and a lot of customers are wary of sharing any of their info”.

First of all, let me explain how this concept works, and then I can also show very simple and non-intrusive ways to reward a customer. 

1) Each player is assigned a unique referral ID when he logs into the game for the first time. (Like how Amazon does it).

2) Every time a player shares the game URL (with the embedded referral ID), he gets rewarded with a few points whenever one of his friends clicks on that link and installs the game.

3) Once a player has received enough points, he can then redeem them for real-world rewards.

In a real-world scenario, you could equate 50 installs to $1. So once about 50 of a players friends have clicked on the shared game URL (with the embedded referral ID) and installed the game, this player would be eligible for a reward worth about a dollar. (I will talk about types of rewards later)

Of course, this is very similar to the Frequent Flyer rewards program. Let’s just call it the Frequent gamer rewards program. But look at the advantages here.

With this method, you don’t have to spend money on advertising on Facebook. Generally CPC rates on Facebook are very high and you need to spend atleast a few hundred dollars a day on marketing your game. A lot of Indie developers spend about a $100 a day on Facebook CPC ads.

A $100 a day spending on Facebook can fetch you a few hundred installs at the maximum. But with this new method, you will be spending a $100 for almost 5000 installs!

      

      This also encourages players to recommend games more often. And people are always more comfortable playing games that are recommended by their own friends.

Ok, now to the tough part. How do you reward your players? For many companies, this can be a legal nightmare. Most rewards have to be mailed to a users address. But in this method, we can completely focus on giving players ‘digital’ rewards. For example:

1) Redbox/Blockbuster DVD kiosk rentals. These DVD’s rent for $1 a day and it’s very easy to give these out as prizes. As you may know, Redbox gives out free rental codes on a regular basis which can be redeemed for a one night DVD rental. A studio could buy these codes in bulk and offer them as prizes.  All a studio has to do is email this code to the reward recipient. No need for any home address, phone number etc.

2) iPhone, iPad and Android paid apps, music and games – Most of these apps sell for 99 cents. And iTunes allows a user to ‘gift’ an app to someone else through the iTunes application. So a company could ‘Gift’ a paid app to a recipient.

3) Game coins – Companies could partner with gaming portals like Hi5 or iWON and offer game coins as prizes. These are easy to gift too.

4) Longer game playtime – A lot of gaming portals like Big Fish Games, Wild Tangent or Gaikai offer playable demos of their games. These games can be played for about 30 minutes before the user has to buy the game. Studios could tie up with such companies and offer longer play times (let’s say 60 minutes) of these demos as rewards.

This is just an abstract and I am happy to share more info about this. As usual, feel free to discuss and point out potential flaws in this method. And I wouldn’t be surprised if such a system has already been tried before.

Thanks, you can follow me @aabidsiddique on Twitter to stay updated about my blogs. Or you can also mail me at aabidsiddique81@yahoo.com if you have any other questions.