Accessing new avenues for game promotion, distribution, and monetization
Traditional notions about gamers and gaming are changing. With
the rise and popularity of social networks as well as the uptake of
broadband services worldwide, the number of casual and social
gamers is growing at an aggressive pace. As a result, so, too, is the gaming
industry.
In fact, online gaming is now the number-one activity on the Internet
across all age groups, generating more money in recent years
than another big entertainment sector: the movie industry. According
to online gaming market research company DFC Intelligence, online
gaming revenue for 2009 was expected to reach $8.8 billion worldwide,
while marketing firm Strategy Analytics projects annual revenue
to reach almost $12 billion by 2011.
For game developers of all sizes, there’s a definite push to jump into
the action. But doing so successfully requires following a few rules.
First, your game has to be playable by the widest possible audience.
Second, keep barriers to playing low so people can enter your game friction-
free. Third, have the ability to rapidly iterate, update, and enhance
your game. And, finally, make sure your game works across multiple
platforms and is available through several application stores.
For independent game developers working with finite budgets, this
is not always easy to accomplish. But with several new services from
Adobe and its partners, winning in the game development market just
got easier.
More Opportunities, Fewer Limits
As you likely know, the Flash Platform supports some of the best casual
games on the Web today. This is due, in part, to streamlined development
workflows among Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Flash Professional,
and the Flex framework—all aimed at driving smooth integration
and iteration of art, sound, and code.
An active community of Flash developers contributes to the strength
of this development environment, as well. Millions of talented developers
not only create great content, but also share massive amounts of
information through online forums, tutorials, user groups, and conferences.
And, last but not least, because the Adobe Flash Player is installed
on virtually every Internet-enabled computer worldwide, you can
develop an Adobe SWF-based game with confidence, knowing that just
about anyone can play it in a browser.
More recently, the introduction of Adobe AIR (a cross-platform runtime
environment) has moved online gaming to off-line environments,
enabling people to play games on their desktop computers, with or
without an Internet connection. And with AIR for Android coming up
in the AIR 2.5 release, the reach will go even further.
But even the most impressive Flash games won’t see action if nobody
knows they’re out there. That’s where several new services from Adobe
and its partners come into play. Created to provide developers with
more opportunities and fewer limits, these services offer a vehicle to
enhance, distribute, and cash in on your SWF-based games. Using the
services, you can easily add social and collaborative capabilities to your
games, accelerate development, reach larger audiences, and find new
ways to monetize your efforts.
Easily Integrate and Stay Up to Date
To reach the broadest range of potential casual gamers players, the titles
need to have a presence across multiple social networks. After all, not
everyone’s playing on Facebook. But who has the bandwidth or the
budget to write separate integration code for each and every network?
Or to write and deploy updates every time an API changes? The Socialize
service from Gigya can help overcome these hurdles.
With the Socialize service, developers can easily integrate leading social
networks with their games. Implemented through a single Action-
Script3 API in Flash or Flex, the service provides an abstraction layer
that connects with multiple networks—including Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace, and a growing number of others. This easy-to-use service
removes the complexity and repetitive work of having to implement
multiple APIs. It also insulates game developers against ongoing changes.
Every time a social network changes an underlying API, the Socialize
service automatically adapts to those changes. That means you don’t
have to rewrite and recompile your code every time a social network
updates an API. Your game doesn’t break, it stays up-to-date, and you
don’t have to do a thing. Plus, you gain access to dashboard analytics to
review and optimize a game’s social performance.
While the Socialize service helps developers get their games in front
of more users without writing separate integration code for each social
network, it also helps gamers have a more engaging, personalized experience
from start to finish. Because the service provides developers
with plug-and-play widgets that utilize the social API for Login, Share,
Invite, Select Friends, and other commands, developers can enable
gamers to invite friends to play, compete and track scores on leader
boards, send updates to news feeds, post achievements to walls, and
“Like” a game in public forums.
For example, through Facebook, Yahoo, and MySpace, gamers
can open the Playfish game “Bowling Buddies,” invite friends to
play, post scores on leader boards, brag about their great bowling
scores on their walls—even display achievement trophies in their
social network profiles.
Obviously, social capabilities like these help deepen engagement
and relevancy for gamers. Even better, they help freely spread the word
about your game every time it’s played. Ultimately, this means you can
promote your game virally and increase registration rates simply by enabling
players to enjoy an immersive, social, online gaming experience.
With the Socialize service, integration with Facebook is free of
charge. There are nominal annual charges to integrate games with other
social networks.
Differentiate Your Game
Once you’ve integrated multiple social networks, you might want to
differentiate your game and deepen engagement even more by adding
real-time collaboration capabilities. Whether adding voice or group
chat functionality to a multi-player card game, or enabling a group of
zombie-killing gamers to see how fellow players are performing in real
time, developers can use the Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service
(LCCS) to cost-effectively include those capabilities in their titles.
LCCS takes many of the components you could build yourself
using technologies such as Flash Media Server or LiveCycle Data Services
ES2, and offers them as a hosted service. By using Adobe to host
real-time push messaging, you can add collaborative and multiplayer
capabilities to your game without the hassle and expense of managing
your own servers.
Here’s how it works. Clients subscribe to shared objects, and any
changes are broadcast to all subscribers in real time. This can
be used to create anything from simple components, like a
multiuser chat box, to much more complex collaborative
applications, such as a multiplayer game wherein character
positions, actions, and other data are instantly shared among
all players. For example, in the SWF-based game “ChessJam,”
players can see each other’s moves in real time and chat with
each other during individual games or tournaments. With
LCCS, you can even stream video to your game or enable
VoIP-like functionality through players’ Webcams and microphones
via P2P streaming using Real-Time Media Flow
Protocol (RTMFP).
But how can you be sure that collaborative capabilities
make sense for your game? You can easily test the collaborative
waters by offering a simple pay-per-use model. That way,
when you’re in the development stage, your hosted LCCS
charges will be low. When your game takes off and gets tons
of collaborative play, you’ll be billed accordingly.
Reach Millions through App Stores
The latest service, Adobe InMarket, was recently launched at Adobe
MAX 2010. Designed to help game developers distribute and make
money with Adobe AIR applications, InMarket serves as a virtual distribution
center that supplies applications to multiple app stores.
Through InMarket, developers have the potential to reach millions
of gamers with minimal expense and effort. If you took care of distribution
yourself, you would have to create and manage integration
with multiple storefronts—which could easily become a full-time, allencompassing
job. Conversely, with this new service, developers only
have to create a game for a particular device profile (the desktop, for
example). Then, InMarket will take care of distributing the game to
multiple online storefronts. If updates are needed to a game’s description,
to change a price, or even upload a new version, it only needs to
be done once because InMarket will modify the information across all
app stores selling the game. InMarket also makes it easier to monetize
games and view download metrics in one place to gauge the user interest
in particular games.
The Intel AppUp Center is the first storefront available in
Melrose. Intel has announced agreements with retailers like Best Buy
and OEMs like Asus to preinstall AppUp on netbooks and notebooks.
With an initial focus on PC-device profiles, Melrose will target
additional profiles, including mobile and television, in the near
future—and will make it simple to package games to match particular
device profiles.
Serious Support for Casual Game Developers
Whether you develop action/adventure games, match-three puzzles,
board games, or role-playing games, the Adobe Flash Platform offers
tools to create and deploy immersive, engaging experiences. Now, casual
game developers can get even more serious support in the form
of Flash-based services. Through these services, you can easily integrate
social and collaborative capabilities, develop more rapidly, distribute
more widely, and monetize more effectively than ever. And as the reach
of Flash Player extends to mobile phones and other devices through the
Open Screen Project and other partnerships, there are more opportunities
than ever before for creative game developers to win big in the
multi-screen world
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