May 18th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Marketing Strategies | No Comments »
Everybody seems to be on services like Facebook and Twitter these days. With all the mobile gaming platforms like N-Gage and RumbleX around, we are surprised that there is no export of achievements to social networking sites at the moment.
When it comes to social networking in the mobile games market, everybody likes the XBLA environment. It shows your profile to the world and allows you to track your achievements. It even allows you to post that data on any website (with a few hacks). This system stood model for Nokia’s N-Gage and we feel that it also did for systems like RumbleX. Now it’s great to see on those platforms that you gained a certain score for a certain game, but do your friends see it? Are they challenged to get involved with the game you are playing? Only if they are connected to the exact same platform.
So where are your friends? They probably are on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. Of those, Twitter is probably the most celebrated one amongst mobile phone owners that are wap-active and so, the example for this editorial.
For platform owners like Nokia (N-Gage), Greystripe (GameJump) and OrangePixel (RumbleX) it should be really easy to connect to API’s of services like Twitter. Next to posting the highscore, the message can also contain a page with more details about the game like (yes!) purchasing information so friends can join up as well. Also, when it’s known that a few Twitter accounts are connected, messages could even say stuff like “Harry has beaten Luke’s Highscore on Space Impact”.
Besides the fact that platform owners can easily connect all their mobile games to services like Twitter, also developers could take such action. Since J2me on most devices allows internet connections to be initiated, you could just ask the player to leave it’s Twitter details in the game and allow for automatic updates.
So why am I writing this? I am a fan of social networking sites, though I don’t use them as much as intended. I just love to make profiles everywhere and so leave my mark in Cyberspace. Even the Mobile Games Blog is connected to Twitter and already gained it’s first followers on: http://twitter.com/mobilegamesblog. The fact that the MGB headlines on Twitter are generated by a simple web service just made me think of all the wonderful things the mobile gaming industry can do on social networking sites to promote itself without spending huge budgets on it.
