Mark van Diggelen’s Casual Games Blog

SkillPod Media has launched its Gazuma mobile games solution, with support for all the most popular mobile handsets and platforms – including Android, Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Nokia Maemo/Symbian, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

Not only is the good news for gamers – it’s also an opportunity for publishers to earn excellent revenue.

To date the platform has been rolled out locally in South Africa, with the leading mobile integrator, Integrat. The site has been branded as Play4Games and forms part of their mobile entertainment brand Play4. Other deployments include, mobile sites in, Luxembourg, Vietnam and Turkey, with a further site being launched in the USA during the next few weeks.

Great choice for gamers

The Gazuma games solution includes 31 initial game titles, with a further 14 titles on the way. Following that SkillPod Media intends to release 3 to 4 new game titles a week. The games have specifically been built with smartphones in mind, and all of them cater for touch screen functionality as well as for navigation keys.

A mobile gaming platform packed with features

Players and publishers can expect a large number of features on the Gazuma mobile games platform, which is playable through the mobile browser on the handsets.

These include:

• tournaments
• challenges
• game ratings
• game information pages
• secure high score logging
• player profiles
• messaging
• friends lists

These features can be viewed on the Gazuma showcase website at www.gazuma.com.

There is also a pods system that allows players to accumulate points which they can spend on game enhancements.

Integration capabilities

The Gazuma platform offers plenty of scope for integration with social networking sites, payment gateways and mobile stores.

Users will be able to buy and download games. There are also already links to the Nokia Ovi store, with a future link to the Apple App store in the offing. This will enable users to buy game titles (although Apple games will not be playable online, due to the iPhone’s inability to play Flash). Blackberry and Android game titles will also be available.

There will be Facebook Connect integration, with the ability to register via Facebook, connect with friends and challenge them in multiplayer games.

And buying games will be an absolute cinch with its global payment gateway integration capability.

Opportunities for publishers

Publishers are presented with plenty of opportunities by the Gazuma mobile games platform. There will be white label solutions to allow publishers to brand the platform themselves.

It also offers XML feeds and plenty of revenue sharing possibilities. Games can be customised and translated according to publisher needs. The Gazuma games platform will be close to a world first, thanks to all this extensibility, customisation and integration ability, coupled with publisher functionality.

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SkillPod Media – South Africa’s leading provider of online casual and skill games that has gained a global footprint – is rolling out a slew of powerful new features for its gaming platform.

“It’s been a hugely productive period for us,” says Mark van Diggelen, CEO of SkillPod Media. “We’ve packed an incredible amount of development into not only our games platform, but also the features that surround it, which will add significant value to our users.” A glance at the recently deployed features fully bears out Van Diggelen’s words.

The SkillPod Media casual games platform now boasts registration integration with Facebook, OpenID, Google, Yahoo, AOL and all sites using the OpenID framework. This means that player accounts can be created with the click of a button on all of these sites.

Facebook Games integration has been completed, including single and multi-players game applications. Google Gadget integration is also fully available.
And of course no deployment would be complete without Twitter integration. In this case the platform can post tweets of users’ high scores and game activity.

New games and game packs

Themed clustered game packages have been created that wonderfully mirror real-world scenarios. There’s the Sports Village (where you can play outdoor games like American football, basketball, baseball and soccer) and the Games Room (where you can play pool, darts, air hockey and more). Extra features are available for subscribers, including direct links to friends on Facebook and other social networking sites, chat features, advertising, customisation, avatars and challenges.

A new premium subscription feature allows users to subscribe to premium games content and tournaments with prizes.

Tailored gaming products for international clients
New games that feature 3D imaging and intro movies have been developed and have proven to be hugely successful.

Adver-games have been developed for specific clients, catering for the FIFA 2010 World Cup, including Nedbank and Media Prima in Malaysia.

Unique features have been specially developed for the European Media Group, RTL. Included are a new tournament solution and a dynamic post-game screen platform that can feature promotional games, special edition games with prizes, dynamic score logging, integrated registration – and other features that give publishers full customisation control over content.

SkillPod Media has had a longstanding partnership with KTV in South Africa, to provide games content that integrates with the channel’s television programming. This contract has been renewed for the 4th year in a row and now includes the provision of the SkillPod Media casual games platform.

A new rapid deployment framework

To add to all of this, SkillPod Media will be rolling out a large number of new developments.

A key expansion will be online and mobile platforms into multiple new foreign territories, including non-English speaking countries. To this end, SkillPod Media has developed a Rapid Deployment Framework. This uses advanced XML framework for expedited deployment of online games portals to global partners. It also allows for rapid re-skinning and translation.

Increased revenue opportunities

SkillPod Media will soon complete the development of various new revenue earning opportunities for its clients. These will include: subscriptions and micropayments; the ability to customise games and sell them; licensing, usage and platform fees.
Also coming up is the rollout of a social gaming and MMOG platform for both online and mobile. Revenues from these will be in the form of micropayments, subscriptions, advertising and game sales.

Fantasy Tribe 3D gaming world
One of the more exciting future releases will be Fantasy Tribe, a social and MMOG gaming solution. This will provide a 3D world for players, with games embedded in various areas of the world. Easter eggs will be planted in various places, which will unlock extra games and bonus features. Users will be able to create their own avatars, with a micropayment system to allow players to “pimp” these avatars. Micropayments can also be used to obtain special features like shields, power-ups, weapons etc. There will be an integrated social networking aspect, allowing players to connect with friends, send messages, chat and issue challenges. Multiplayer games therefore form a large part of the platform. Fantasy Tribe will be heavily promoted on social networking sites like Facebook.

A multitude of new developments

In addition to all of this, SkillPod Media is also working on:

• improved multiplayer games for enhanced community building
• game lobby enhancements (including improved tables, rooms, chat and scoring)
• increased Facebook integration – play against your friends
• self-service in-game advertising solution
• development and deployment of USSD games
• avatar creation, with a micropayment system for avatar enhancement

There’s little doubt that very soon the SkillPod Media games platform will offer a quantum leap in casual gaming. One that will benefit players, publishers and advertisers alike.

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In 2007 marketers were eyeing addictive casual games sites as the next big advertising arena. That prediction turned out to be spot on, as proved by SkillPod Media, a global new media consultancy specialising in the provision and development of custom and innovative online and mobile casual games solutions. Services are offered to agencies, publishers and advertisers. SkillPod Media has branched out into the in-game advertising space via Mochi Media and the Google Gadgets advertisement and game syndication platforms.
In-game advertising

Advertisers see online game advertising as a prime way to target the mass market of males 18-34 years of age, the teen mass market, and especially the female mass market, who are all increasingly neglecting television in favour of games, across all genres and platforms. Increasing internet connectivity has led to the growth of dynamic online game advertising. In-game advertising has even started replacing the traditional mobile games business model of ‘buy the game to play the game’ with advertisers distributing their branded game titles free of charge.

In addition to creating brand awareness, users tend to view in-game adverts as unobtrusive as they often create a more realistic and humorous gaming environment that is coherent with our own reality. Branded games have proven to promote repeated traffic to websites, reinforce brands and are one of the most successful ways of reaching any audience by means of brand specific and focused ad-placement.

Go Global!
The in-game advertising industry hosts several advertising agencies or ad networks dedicated to the delivery of in-game advertising, including companies such as Mochi Media. The growth and potential of the market has enticed more traditional advertising agencies into exploring the concept of in-game advertising.

The Mochi platform is another recent success story for SkillPod Media, and is just a drop in the bucket of the revenue and potential which awaits SkillPod. Currently, 44 of SkillPod’s games are loaded on Mochi’s site, available for other websites to load on their sites, via various syndication options offered by the platform. Each Mochi game has a game pre-loader advertisement, and for each click on the banner, the publisher and developer earns revenue. The subtle SkillPod branding within these games is designed to navigate users back to SkillPod’s website. This has proven a worthy user acquisition and retention tool, with a noticeable number of daily new users and a 70% average daily return rate. Traffic on SkillPod’s website has increased exponentially with the inclusion of the SkillPod games on the Mochi platform, with a million extra game plays being achieved in the first month from users across the globe. SkillPod has adopted a similar approach to the Google Gadgets service and has to date added 130 games to the service. iGoogle and Google Desktop users browse through the catalogue of games and applications available and then simply add these to their unique pages. Adopting this service has been hugely beneficial to SkillPod and its game titles as these are accessed 100,000’s of times a month, thus contributing significantly to bringing about awareness of the SkillPod games brands and services.

This increase in traffic brings about a number of opportunities for advertisers as SkillPod can republish any of the game titles, with the advertisers branded version, to the existing user base, thus ensuring an instant audience for the campaign.

Localisation
As SkillPod Media’s business is now approximately 80% international, it has to date localised its services into Afrikaans, Polish, Russian, Spanish and more recently into Dutch, with its client RTL. SkillPod has furthered its international expansion by launching a simple games site in Turkey, and the launch was rewarded with 8,000 unique visitors in the first 24 hours.

The translation of games and the games platform into foreign languages has been proven to be successful for the advertisers and publishers alike and SkillPod is finding that more and more non English speaking partners are realising that games are a proven medium to attract and return users. SkillPod has in excess of 450 game titles that can be translated into any language and can be fully localised and / or branded.

What opportunities does in-game advertising present?
SkillPod Media continues to make inroads with its in-game advertising offerings which bring about, increased website traffic with higher return rates, advertising placement opportunities in one of the largest and fastest growing online industries. SkillPod offers advertisers and publishers a number of opportunities, new branding and marketing avenues, banner campaigns, tournament and prize sponsorship, advertising in game pre-loaders, in-game advertising opportunities, advergaming solutions, game customisation, custom game development and interstitial campaigns. A game can be re-skinned, translated and branded exclusively highlighting the specific brand.

Gaming provides an inventive branding solution, particularly in today’s challenging financial arena. “Budget cuts are a reality at the moment, with clients becoming more and more price conscious. Agencies need to become more creative when they conceptualise their campaigns, which is where gaming comes in as a cost effective means of reaching a predefined target market. The fact that we can fully customise the games to meet the objectives of the specific campaign, as well as target them at a particular audience, are further benefits of casual gaming as a marketing element,” says van Diggelen, CEO of SkillPod Media.

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