Comment Central

Paul Stevens

Viral games are fun engaging mini-games that can be played directly in an internet browser using the flash plug-in and free to play they have mass global appeal. There are currently thousands available, many of which are presented within game portals and blogs such as gamenet.com and inboxjunkies.com. 

A good game will get promoted editorially by website and blog owners and spread from portal to portal with relative ease. Through this method, really good quality viral games have been known to attract tens, or even hundreds, of millions of players.  This is where the 'viral game' - also referred to as advergame, casual game, online game, mini game or widget game; as a marketing concept was born. 

Any piece of engaging online content that users will interact with for long periods of time is always going to be a great marketing tool, but if you can get this game distributed to tens of millions of people with minimal media spend, then it becomes incredibly powerful. But to be successful it’s vital to execute the various elements of the campaign – strategy, creative, seeding and technology; correctly.

It’s very easy for an expensive viral gaming campaign to fall flat if simple rules aren’t followed. Here are some tips for ensuring viral success:

1. Getting the strategy right There’s no point in getting 5 million players on a game, if it’s not going to achieve your marketing objectives. Viral games can be a very effective tool for delivering branding messages, collecting opt-in registrations and driving click throughs to external websites but, if a game is over branded, or forces registration, or too clearly drives people away from the game portals, then your success will be limited. The key is clever integration of these elements into the game itself whilst meeting the interests of the gaming community 

2. Getting the creative rightSecondly, you need to make sure that the game itself is good enough. The online community won’t editorially promote a game for you it isn’t fun for its users. The simple rule is, the better the game, the more free exposure you’ll get. And the only way to build amazing online games is simply to keep building them and learning from each one. A game might look beautiful, but its playability might let it down. The goal is to create a game with very high quality content, addictive features and real depth.

3. Getting the seeding right Peer-to-peer spread is an important part of a successful viral marketing campaign, but in terms of delivering numbers and success, friend to friend/tell-a-friend functionality contributes very little.  The real big player numbers will come directly from the hundreds of online game portals, websites and blogs in the online gaming community. Collectively, these sites form a network that has editorial influence with, and access to, hundreds of millions of online gamers around the world. Some of these portals are larger sites that operate as legitimate businesses, but the majority are smaller sites that webmasters run out of their garages as a hobby.

The best way to get your game out there to both of these groups is to use a seeding agency that: - has strong relationships with the big portals and can deliver cost effective 'cost per player' placements- has a good reputation with (and a database of) the many smaller blogs, sites and portals in the network.  All 'switched on' media agencies will be able to deliver the 'cost per player' buys with the larger portals, but won't have the access to the real community that eventually drives the multiple millions of players which come from having launched hundreds of viral games and building up these relationships over time. A good viral seeding agency should offer extremely cost effective cost per player rates, but also a proven record of launching good games into the free online gaming community and delivering multi-million player numbers.

4. Getting the technology rightViral games can potentially consist of large media files that utilise complex database connectivity to manage functionality such as data collection, leagues and global ranking.  By their very nature viral games are unpredictable and hugely expandable.

Chris Moyles could start ranting about your game on prime time radio and kill your servers or Stephen Fry could 'tweet' your game and send 5,000 players simultaneously to your game. So you need to carefully consider the hosting infrastructure that your game sits on. When choosing an agency there are a number of technology issues to consider – you need to be looking for one that that can offer high quality bandwidth at a reasonable cost (1,000,000 downloads of a 5 meg game can get expensive) and that has proven experience in hosting games that have truly gone viral and hit millions of players in a short period of time.

And, if your campaign is global, you should be looking to work with an agency that uses 'the cloud' CDN technology to distribute your game locally to your users. There’s nothing worse than creating the perfect viral campaign that goes amazingly viral, but then fails because of the technology was not up to the job. 

 Author: Paul Stevens, Media Director, ViralNet, www.viralnet.com -  a division of Digital Marketing Group plc