October 28th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Marketing Strategies, Platforms: iOS | No Comments »
The company behind AGON Online has launched a new games portal to promote games supporting the community engine. With the portal, the company hopes consumers will find it more easy to discover AGON titles.
We visited the portal and found a page containing 123 icons of AGON supporting games with a graphic presentation at the top and some of the latest achievements scrolling by. When clicking on any of the icons, we get a full presentation of the game in question. For our tour, we picked DizzyRoids.
The games are presented with a small number of screenshots and a description next to them. AGON adds a virtual globe on which we can see top players from around the world. Next to it, are leaderboards. In the leaderboards of this game we see 6 people submitting scores on easy, 11 on medium and 3 on hard. Clearly this isn't a popular game.
Apart from this info, there's not really much to do on the portal that could create any retention value. I personally know no gamer who is interested in knowing if someone has beaten him or her in a global leaderboard and if so, he or she checks it in the game itself. The site also doesn't have something simple like an RSS feed to inform you on your scored, achievements or even if there is a new game available.
We think portals like these might be a clever way of marketing games, but there should be some sort of pull factor included to make sure consumers will come (back) and stay. 'If you build it, they will come' is just not enough.
