Menu
Last year, several people I spoke with at Casual Connect Europe predicted that in the next edition of the event, there would be a serious increase in the number of companies involved in or offering social game development. Clearly, they were right.
While it’s not very difficult to get a game up and running on a social network, it’s becoming harder and harder to get enough players to your game and be successful. Relying on the viral spreading accommodated by the social networks alone simply isn’t enough any more: all social games are doing this.
While most companies are throwing advertising in the mix to drive more players to their games, the advertising rates are rising.
The next step on the way to a successful social game is now cross-promotion: having your social game refer to other games and vice versa.
Zynga is doing this with their own ‘cross-promotion bar’ (see image). This is an important part of the explanation why they are dominating the social games on Facebook. This month, the seven most successful games on Facebook in terms of number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) were all from their stable.
Smaller social game developers who don’t have a lot of games online can still use cross-promotion trough a cross-promotion network such as Appplifier, AppStrip, and IGAPI.
Probably the best solution is to get your game published by one of the top social game publishers. Because they have more players, their cross-promotion is much more powerful.
If you’re looking to pitch your social game concept to one of these publishers, prototyping will give you a huge advantage over the competition.