West to East and East to West: How Brands in Mobile Gaming can Bring the World Together

Note: This article was first written and published for the Chinese publication GameRes in November 2015

Introduction
In the West we are seeing a consolidation of the mobile gaming market. The Top 5 slots have been occupied by the same games (companies) for the past year: Game of War, Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, Boom Beach and Candy Crush Soda Saga. Most of these games were the Top 5 in 2014 as well. This is a sign of a maturing market — consolidation of the top players where they continuously have the unfair advantage. What is a US mobile game maker to do?

Moving towards the East, we are slowly seeing similar consolidation just starting to happen, particularly in China. For China we are seeing a channel consolidation while the number of game developers have increased four fold — from 4,000 game developers in 2014 to 14,000 game developers in 2015 (source: Happy Universe). Eventually the game developers will have only a few channels to distribute their game which will mean consolidation will happen within each of the few channels left. What is a China mobile game maker to do?

Enter brands. Brands are effective in several areas: distinguish yourself from the other games, increase installs due to brand awareness, and therefore reduce the cost of acquisition. However for a game that is using a brand to be successful we first must understand the market landscape, how brands are used in the US and China, and finally how successful games leverage brands.

How Brands are used in the East and the West

Looking at the differences in the marketplaces, we can see the impact of brands for each marketplace. In the West, mainly the US, attracting players can be done based on performance based marketing. This means US game developers can buy traffic from other sites or mobile apps such as Facebook (social networking app) or Pandora (radio music app) to come to our game. This works very well in the West because the population density is not as high and the technology infrastructure is set up for game developers to buy ads easily, effectively and economically. However, because of the ease for any game developer to do this, the cost per install or (cost of acquisition) is rising because game companies cause the pricing to increase for all game developers in the ecosystem. Many game developers have turned to TV advertising. TV is used to drive downloads and much software is being built to measure when a TV ad is shown along with a more rudimentary measurement of a promotion code entered after seeing a TV ad. This is all in the effort of discovering how many downloads or app visits did the ad have. This can work well work on a unit economic basis but as a total sum, TV advertising is not a cheap endeavor. Therefore you want to make sure you are leveraging your TV time as wisely as possible. Brands give viewers a quick recognition and higher likelihood to download.

For China, offline marketing is still incredibly important. The main reason for this is the population density in China is so much higher. Not only are there more people in China, but the density is a lot higher. Therefore spending money on a subway ad makes a lot of sense, when almost 9MM people can see it daily in one city alone (source: Wikipedia). However getting offline attention has its own challenges especially when the game is meant to be played online — on the mobile phone. Therefore, you will find a lot of QR codes to enable users to download the game by scanning the QR code. This infrastructure is well built all over China to allow O2O transfer a lot easier. However like performance based marketing in the US, buying subway ads can get quite expensive when the space is so much more limiting than the number of game developers. TV is also used, but it is used to drive awareness of the game. QR codes on TV make it more difficult to scan and therefore difficult to measure how many installs the TV ad drove.
When you have precious space such as a subway ad or a TV ad, you want to use it as smartly as possible. Brands are a way to ensure that when a player sees an ad, the likelihood of download is much higher because of the recognition. This in turn drives down the cost of the install or user. If a brand enables a person to see an ad once and instantly recognize then download versus a person needing to see an ad multiple times to remember the game, the one with the brand will have a cheaper cost of user acquisition. For the marketing environment alone, both the east and west are turning towards brands to help them out.

How Successful Mobile Games Use Brands

A brand extends much farther than at the point of marketing when developing a great game. Great game developers do two things in integrating the brand into the game: they view the brand as a partner and are able to augment the brand value.

The best partnerships are when the brand and the game developer are more than just marketing partners; they are creative partners as well. Brand partners that lend some of their writers or access to the creators of that IP have a huge advantage to be able to more tightly bring that brand essence into the game. We have seen this with many Western games such as Marvel: Contest of Champions (by Kabam) or Walking Dead: Road to Survival (by Scopely). When the game developer partners creatively, this lends more naturally to partnering from a marketing perspective. When a partnership is good, the game developer can use the brand’s existing channels to talk about that update. This way it reaches as many fans as possible, and it is free marketing for the game developer. When a partnership is great, the game developer and brand can do something creatively aligned and eventually create campaigns that are tightly integrated, such as announce key beats of the brand franchise together, have a booth together at an event, or create a campaign that crosses between the offline fans and the online players. Thus, reaching both fans and players.

The second key to successfully partnering with the brand is to find a way to augment the brand value. The entire idea of partnerships is that the brand and the game developer both bring something to the relationship. Oftentimes game developers will be able to deeply engage players into the brand. For example, when the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron was released the partner enabled the game developer to show an exclusive trailer in their game. This enabled the trailer to be viewed millions of times and participate in driving ticket sales to the movie.

The final key to success is go past the brand — deeply integrating the brand in the game. This is done even when choosing the genre of the game. We see this in the Chinese game 花千骨- where the game developers did not just make an endless runner or puzzle game; instead, they chose the genre thoughtfully to be in line with the story and characters of the TV show 花千骨. The brand is the source of IP for the game and should be treated with respect, but leveraged as highly as possible for the game developer. When this is done, the brand can look to the game developer as a source of IP. This is extremely rare but has happened. For the mobile game Marvel: Contest of Champions, the brand decided to re-release the Contest of Champions comic book series from the 1980’s when they did, Marvel wanted a new character for the Marvel Universe. Rather than asking the comic book writers for a new character, they went to the game developer studio and asked them to create a new character for their comic book and universe. It was because the partnership was so good that the rare opportunity presented itself. The source of IP was now coming from the game developer. Now, that’s great partnership.

Conclusion

As marketing prices increases, getting players is more and more difficult. Brands both in the East and West are the best leverage points as a marketing partner and a creative partner. But the partnerships must be successful. In order to be successful the game developer must work together with the brand to augment the brand value and deeply integrate the brand essence into the game. When a game developer and brand does that, amazing things can happen.