Business

Why Twitter should be an essential tool for any aspiring games developer?

In an age were social networking dominates every day life, it’s hard not to notice it’s influence on the work place. We live in a time where almost every imaginable business or company has their own Facebook page, every key employee or employer has a Linked In profile, but arguably the medium which has the most presence in terms of the world of work, is Twitter.

As of June 2012  Twitter reached 500 million users worldwide and even though it’s still another 500 million shy of Facebook’s 1 billion, more companies are beginning to have a stronger presence on Twitter than the older Facebook. Not that this blog is suggesting that companies are entirely neglecting Facebook, it just appears that Twitter is where more customer engagement and promotion is occurring.

Take Starbucks for example; they are to date the number one most social engaged of the Interbrand Top 100 according to CNBC . They have over 3 million followers and are constantly communicating with their audience, participating in threaded discussions and posting new offers which sees their audience growing daily. One could just argue that people like coffee and like getting in on deals, but regardless, you can’t deny that Starbucks keeping their finger on the buzzer with Twitter is only good for their business.

So where does Twitter come into play as far as aspiring games developers are concerned? Because not taking advantage of Twitter is something that up and coming developers can’t afford to miss out on. Twitter is not just a format for promoting your product or service, it’s a medium to gain a much more extensive insight on the developments within your industry, it’s a way to find out from your community and your target audience what you’re doing right or wrong and it’s a way to keep track of what your competitors are doing so you’re never too far behind them. But most of all, it’s a way of getting noticed.

Let’s look at some examples, starting with “love-em or hate-em” game developer tycoon’s Electronic Arts. EA have an incredibly strong Twitter presence, with over 1 million followers to date, their feed includes all of their sub accounts and accounts for some of their games such as Battlefield or Medal of Honor which have at times had their own promoted tweets dominate Twitters trend sections. They also regularly engage with their followers with retweets of their comments and photos relating to EA. Because they are keeping themselves engaged with their community they are getting themselves noticed and because they are getting noticed, their investment in Twitter is paying off.

Successful uses of Twitter as a business tool in the games industry isn’t just limited to the companies however, key figures within the companies have found success also. Markus Persson of Mojang and mastermind behind the immensely popular sandbox game Minecraft currently has around 950,000 followers and is known to have an extremely vocal and at times controversial presence within the Twitterverse. While Minecraft has become a driving force of indie games due to its compelling gameplay and word of mouth buzz over the internet, Persson’s presence on Twitter and no-publicity-is-bad-publicity stance doesn’t exactly hurt Mojang’s brand awareness. If anything, it makes it even stronger.

Similarly, Cliff Bleszinksi, formerly of Epic Games, is another individual who is known to taking quite an unusual stance on Twitter with his particular humorous and laid back approach to dishing out tweets to get himself (previously his company) noticed. Just recently, he made the headlines for offering to “fix” the declining Resident Evil franchise after the polarized reception of Capcom’s latest installment to the franchise “Resident Evil 6”.

These are not the only approaches to getting yourself noticed on Twitter, just some examples. You don’t have to be quirky or break the trend to get yourself noticed, but you do need to know your audience and the type of people you want to sell yourself to. That is something which the listed examples can say they have got covered. (well perhaps not EA after this year’s Mass Effect related controversy which aided in their awarding of “Worst Company in America“!)

This guest blog was written by Ryan Edwards (PR intern) – Ryan is a former International Journalism student from Liverpool John Moores University, with a working background in PR and Marketing. *All views are his own.

https://twitter.com/RyEdwards91

Should big, traditional, games companies get involved with location-based gaming?

There’s no doubt that location based gaming is a format with great potential. It’s rare to find a successful niche in an industry as crowded as ours but this is definitely something these types of games have managed to do. It’s a young genre and arguably still finding its feet, but the early successes show that with the right investment there is great potential.

Take PerBlue’s mobile location based massively mutltiplayer hit “Parallel Kingdom” for example. An RPG which places users in a virtual world based on the player’s GPS location, it was the first RPG in a location based format for iOS and Android platforms and as of last year, its user base surpassed 1 million users worldwide. A fair share of boxed products on consoles struggle to reach 1 million users let alone surpass that figure, for a free-to-play location-based game to do that is an impressive feat.

“Shadow Cities”, an award winning iOS game from Finish developers Grey Area which splits players into two factions to conquer their city, is another fine example. It shows the potential that location-based gaming has to offer potential investors and big game companies.

Gaming is not the only area that the location-based format is present in, there is one particular non-gaming example which even casual or non-gamers will have heard of. While not a game itself, look at the popularity of the location-based social networking app Foursquare. How many friends on your Facebook do you see constantly “checking-in” at whatever location they happen to be at the time? As of April 2012, it has been reported that around 20 million Facebook users currently use Foursquare worldwide. Now imagine these users as hypothetical customers of a location-based game priced at around £1. That’s £20 million in revenue! Of course this is an extremely ambitious estimate, but one that is not entirely out of the realms of possibility. All it takes is the right marketing and an appealing theme for a game to take flight to these sorts of heights.

Whilst TV-based consoles would obviously not benefit from location based games, handheld consoles such as PlayStation Vita, with its own built-in GPS, could certainly cash in on the potential that the genre has. Sony has a track record of introducing new types of game experiences to their handheld devices, with Augmented Reality games like Reality Fighter. Imagine the scope that a big company like Sony would be able to offer up to location based games on the Vita. Such an investment would breathe new life into a small niche and give more room to expand in bigger gaming formats.

Nintendo 3D’s Street Pass which allows gamers to play each other by toting their devices is arguably the closest that console gaming has come to embracing the notion of location based games, but event this is a relatively small step in terms of the ambitions which this medium of gaming is capable of.

Of course like most sources of investment, location based gaming is not without its flaws. Even going back to discussing Foursquare earlier, you have to ask yourself the question, just how many of those 20 million users, are active users? The same can be applied to games like Parallel Kingdoms, not all of those 1+ million users will be using that game at one time. Most location based games are free-to-play and there lies the real disadvantage for big companies as far as investment is concerned. It isn’t like boxed games, where upon purchase the real source of profit has been made.

So how exactly could location based gaming work with big games companies? The answer lies with changing the revenue model. Whilst a pay-to-play model would undoubtedly find its fair share of critics in the form of its die hard fans, it may well have to be the next step in seeing location based games progress to the level of ambition it has set up for itself. In-App purchases may keep location based games steady but in reality there is only so far that these games can progress by having this as the only source of revenue. World of Warcrafts pay monthly model may not sit well with some of the more casual gamers, but it’s 10.2 million subscribers are testament to the fact that this type of model works well enough for Blizzard.

This isn’t the only model that is available to location games, this is just merely one example. A pay-to-own model would hypothetical see much change in boosting how attractive location gaming would appear to bigger investors. If location based games wants to grow further, it may need to bite the bullet and embrace the idea of a model that sees better financial gain.

 

Guest blog by Ryan Edwards (PR intern):

Ryan is a former International Journalism student from Liverpool John Moores University, with a working background in PR and Marketing

https://twitter.com/RyEdwards91

Big Data Masterclass turns BdaaS

We recently organised a Big Data Masterclass in conjunction with the good folks from OpenLabs @LJMU, who did an amazing job hosting the whole thing at the Roscoe Rooms in Liverpool’s Rodney Street.

It was a great event with a really diverse crowd and Heather delivered an insightful and well considered session that was very well received. BdaaS – Big Data as a Service – is clearly a burgeoning industry facing some interesting challenges.

Follow Heather on Twitter to hear what else she’s got say for herself and check out the photos from the event here.

Follow us on SetgoAnalytics to hear about future events like this one.

Photos courtesy of Ryan McGuinness Photography