February 7th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Events & Conferences | No Comments »
The last part of the Marketing ABC was lead by Stephane Adamiak who works at the Games Business unit of France Telecom called GOA. He explains the value of communities for the casual games industry and the trials with orange to bring it to mobile.
The reason for building a community amongst casual gamers in a competitive market like this one is to create loyalty. Consumers rather purchase games from “their own” spot. A community is a perfect alternative to offering original content as offering such content is often more expensive. The community will help to create a strong identity.
To acquire and expand users of your community, you need to answer expectations. Gao has focus groups to determine what and if any features are needed. To keep the users in the community, Gao also looks at social and emotional involvement. Users can earn a certain status to show to their friends for example.
Goa is also spending a lot of time on identifying their consumers. For example, they learned that showing too many features is scary for most consumers. At the same time, the terminology should be limited as people for example are not aware what Beta software is. Goa does try to educate the community, but fresh users will always flow in.
A big danger is also the cultural differences of the community members. Unlike the real world, where racial discrimination in communities is a big problem, the Goa community tries to be also neutral when it comes to interests. It wants to appeal to all genres, from non-fiction to sci-fi.
A good example for communities according to Stephane is Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. That game is not primarily about connected gaming, but it does show the power of scheduled events where consumers go online on certain dates. Contests alone will not be enough. To facilitate this, games have to communicate with the community services as much as possible.
Goa has trialed mobile 2 mobile multiplayer community games before without success, but will try mobile 2 web community games. Another thing that Goa will try is to spread free games in which separate items have to be purchased.
