Advertising revenue from casual gaming has reshaped the online gaming landscape. The development of casual online games is getting more popular as more money is being generated by the industry. As a result, it can be hard for a game to gain popularity, stand out from the rest and stay in front of potential gamers due to the slew of new games. Where should a developer look to earn more money for their development time?
Adding Social Aspects Through Online Games
The emerging online multiplayer game space is allowing independent developers an opportunity to tap into the social gaming features so popular now on console game platforms. This can translate into more money earned by developers by creating games that develop followings in a less crowded space.
Making a game multiplayer won’t, by itself, increase popularity or active life expectancy. To achieve long-term popularity, games needs to enjoy the same community enabled benefits that are reserved for games at some of the big established online game portals.
Up until recently, most developers didn’t have easy access to a multiplayer community enabled gaming platform. You had to be working for distributor or portal in order to enjoy the benefits of a well-organized community. Recently, a few online platforms have began to materialize, offering the independent developer the means and tools to make their game a community-enabled multiplayer game.
By embedded community elements from day one in a game, developers can further allow the social nature of the game to be realized. Close integration with these social functions ensures increased marketing and traffic as well as an extended game life, all resulting in long term revenues for the developer.
Choosing Your Multiplayer Toolset
While all these features are not necessary for a successful multiplayer game, many are worthwhile considerations for developers in their search for a gaming community toolset:
- Accessibility: The ability to access all community features from wherever you place your game - it doesn’t need to be exclusive to a specific site.
- Both guest and registered user entry. You don’t want to frighten away players with a mandatory registration, but at the same time, the registered users will in time make up the hard core of your playing public.
- A full suite of social tools - avatars, detailed profiles with search, chat, messaging, friend lists etc. This will make the players hang around even when not playing and help establish a community environment.
- Achievement and reward systems. These will greatly enhance players’ motivation to come back to the game to try and win new medals, powers, prizes, etc. for their avatars. Bragging rights and in-player trading of prizes will make your player community alive with competitiveness. Detailed High Score tables are of course a basic necessity.
- Event management tools to allow you to organize special games, leagues and tournaments. Keeps the game fresh for a long time.
- Viral marketing tools: one of the most important aspects of a good community platform is that it empowers your players to carry word of your game around the net. Instead of being limited to people who frequent online gaming sites and blogs, the right tools will allow your players to expand the game’s sphere of popularity into the largest, busiest social centers on the web, places such as Facebook and MySpace.
- Premium content: in the long run, you may wish to include additional content for advanced players, unlocked with micro-payments or subscription models.
One of the most powerful aspects of multiplayer games IMHO is their ability to create bonds between the players which becomes a new kind of content - bringing them back again and again. Writ large a multiplayer game is an MMO. Writ small it can be a portable Flash game plunked down in various places around the Web.
However, the ability of a portable game to generate community is limited as its fragmented player-base does not share the same context the way they do in an MMO. The social context surrounding a game that one returns to frequently can often become more important than the game itself in creating long-term engagement. Creating this social context is part tech and part art - just look at the number of successful and failed MMOs.
So as a developer, I think you need to look at multiplayer as not only a tools question but also a social engineering one. Can your toolset enhance your ability to create the right social glue? Are you ready to spend time on that question or would you rather focus on a given game? Why will players return over time to give you money again and again? If you’re going to partner with another company to add value to your multiplayer efforts, what are their social engineering credentials?
you are very correct raj>>>>