iPhone game developers cooperate to build audiences
If you can create hit games on the iPhone, you can make a much bigger impact and more money by sharing your audience with other game developers who need to get their games noticed.
Social Gaming Network, whose iBowl and iBaseball games are popular on the iPhone, is doing that today by opening up its game cross-marketing efforts to promote games from other developers to the 12 million people who have purchased its own. The first two game developers to join are Punch Entertainment (with its Reign of Swords game) and Smallmedium (maker of eMees Avatar Creator).
The strategy mirrors that of SGN’s efforts to create a cross-promotional network on Facebook, where everyone wins by getting the fans of one game to try another. While Facebook has more than 5,000 games, there are more than 9,000 on the iPhone. So it’s all the more difficult to get a new game noticed.
Rivals have already launched this kind of cross-promotional network. Aurora Feint did so with its OpenFeint platform, which has a feature dubbed iPromote that lets gamers enter the same chat room and cross-promote games to each other. Other companies like Zynga cross-promote games on Facebook and are likely to do so, if they haven’t already, on the iPhone. The question is whether games can spread on the iPhone in the same viral way they can on Facebook. Another rival, which deals with all sorts of apps, is the AdMob Download Exchange.
Shervin Pishevar, chief executive of Palo Alto, Calif.-based SGN, anticipates a rush of new applications to the iPhone as Apple launches the third version of its iPhone operating system this summer. That will make it harder to stand out in the crowd. So SGN will create in-game banner ads to promote other games to its users. If the gamers download the other apps, they can get points to spend inside SGN’s games. The partners can split the resulting revenue from the sale of a new game.
Next Story: Amimon to launch second-generation wireless video chip set
Previous Story: Associated Content nabs $6M for its publishing tools
About the Author, Dean Takahashi
Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.