Used to be a time when gaming was about skill and strategy. Hours spent mastering a dangerous curve in Need for Speed or the perfect collaborative team play in a Counter –Strike.
Today Cityville, Farmville and Nightclub City are the new AAA titles. Skill has been overtaken by the number of friends you have “in-game” and even more by your propensity to whip out a credit card.
Buy those virtual goods and level up!
Social gaming behemoth Zynga gets 90% of its $500 million revenues through micropayments. Even earlier Virtual Worlds like Habbo and IMVU seduced users with millions of virtual goods in their catalogs and at an ARPU of $1-$2 a month they have micropaved their way to success.
But is every player using micropayments? No! Only 3% of Zynga’s users are estimated to have used micropayments.
Also, in many countries like India regulatory and technical challenges have prevented micropayments from taking off. Even if we did solve those challenges only a small percentage would use micropayments. Or they may need a larger carrot?
Now we do know that all players shop and spend money in the offline world on “real” things. There lies the opportunity.
I call it “Click and Mortar” Gaming – the integration of online game performance with offline rewards and vice versa.
Imagine you are playing a cricket game on Facebook, and are quite the Captain Fantastic. Wouldn’t it be great that every time you won a match, the game was to add Rs 2 to your bank account? Play 5 matches a day, win 4 out of 5, 22 days a month – that’s 176 bucks or a free ticket at your neighborhood multiplex.
Consider the reverse scenario - If a Supermarket chain would tie up with say a Zynga. If you shopped for INR 5,000 or more a month it would get you an auto level up in the game.
Or unlock Special game missions.
So Marketers need to create an offline ecosystem around popular games. If it’s an advergame then they have the advantage of owning both the game and the offline value proposition. How about cobranded Loyalty Cards?
Breakdown the barrier between the virtual and the physical world and cross-reward and watch players increase consumption – of both the game and the physical goods and services.
What do you think? What has been your experience in integrating the online and offline worlds of your consumers? How challenging is building an ecosystem of partners? Comments are open!
Next post I’ll talk about the other things that games do very well apart from community building – Immersion!
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