Angry Birds Creator Has First Original Idea

Until last Thursday, I had no faith in Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish developer behind Angry Birds.


As the addictive mobile game continued to dominate the world’s mobile devices (it has been downloaded one billion times as of May) and Rovio prepared for a possible multi-billion-dollar valuation, I sat back with a smug look on my face and predicted disaster, assuming that the studio was a one-hit wonder.
In the three years since Rovio’s rise to mobile dominance began, it hasn’t developed a single game without the Angry Birds branding. Given that Angry Birds was directly inspired by the browser game Crush the Castle, it seemed Rovio was far more adept at marketing than game design.
Then, on Sept. 27, it released Bad Piggies, a vehicle-themed spinoff of Angry Birds for mobile devices and PC. It’s a cute, funny, wonderfully designed game. Bad Piggies lets players create their own flimsy vehicles piece by piece, then guide that vehicle through treacherous levels using goofy contraptions like fans, balloons and TNT.
Most importantly, it’s completely original. It stands out among the glut of physics-based puzzle games that have flooded the App Store in Angry Birds‘ wake.
With adept marketing, attractive characters and original content, Rovio is poised to become the Nintendo of the mobile world: the foremost maker of appealing, fun games designed around the strengths of the new platforms.
Copying isn’t uncommon in the videogame business. It’s hard to find a single game publisher that hasn’t been guilty of it at some point, especially when it’s just starting out.
Nintendo’s first arcade games were total rip-offs. In 1978 it released Block Fever, a bland, imaginationless clone of Atari’s Breakout. The next year it followed up with Space Fever, a shameless knock-off of Space Invaders.
But within a few short years, Nintendo was known as the industry’s innovation leader, creating revolutionary games like The Legend of Zelda.
Although it copied the concept of Crush the Castle, Rovio improved everything about it: the user interface, the art, the music, the level designs. But it was still based on someone else’s gameplay insight. Another recent Rovio game, Amazing Alex, is a previously existing iPhone game called Casey’s Contraptions that the company bought and rebranded. Good marketing, no innovation.
Just cloning, and not innovating, can be dangerous. Take Zynga (please). The Facebook gamemaker hit it big in 2009 with FarmVille (copied wholesale from Chinese farm games), bought the maker of Words With Friends (a copy of Scrabble), and is mostly in the news today for a lawsuit about an alleged game copy, mass executive evacuations and a stock price that looks like a double black diamond ski slope.
Bad Piggies makes it appear as if Rovio wants to be on a different trajectory. Sure, the characters themselves are spun off from the Angry Birds brand. But gameplay is king, and creating something that doesn’t feel like anything else on the market is the only way that the industry can sustain itself in the long term.
If Rovio continues to produce games like Bad Piggies, it can become something much greater than “the Finnish guys who made Angry Birds.” It might be the first truly powerful force in the games industry born on mobile devices.

source: wired

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Facebook to Advertisers: Users Don’t Have to Click for It to Pay Off

“It is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.”
And with that, Facebook has a new strategy when it comes to convincing marketers that their ad dollars are well spent on the network. As long as the user sees your ad, they’ll want to buy your product or service. It doesn’t matter if they click, so you should really stop worrying about that metric at all.
Facebook isn’t just telling marketers all of this out of the blue – this comes straight out of a study conducted with new partners Datalogix. The study looked at over 50 digital campaigns and attempted to connect exposure to an ad on Facebook with in-store purchases of said products.
The name Datalogix may ring a bell, and that’s because their partnership with Facebook has raised some eyebrows over the last week. Datalogix is the owner of a massive database of consumer purchasing data. That data, when matched with Facebook data on ad impressions, can give marketers a general picture on whether or not their ad dollars are being spent on ads the directly lead to in-store purchases.
And that partnership with Datalogix has turned into a way for Facebook to tout their advertising clout with marketers.
Here’s what Facebook’s Measurement and Insights head Brad Smallwood had to say about the study in a studio blog post:

Impressions create value. 99 percent of sales generated from online branding ad campaigns were from people that saw, but did not interact with, ads— proof that it is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.
Reach drives revenue for online brand marketers. This is a concept very familiar to TV marketers, who often start with a reach objective—but until now hadn’t been proven for online. When applied to digital brand campaigns, the study demonstrated that campaigns that maximized reach had on average a 70 percent higher return-on-investment.
Finding the right message frequency is key. The study revealed that for online brand campaigns, if you reallocated high frequency impressions to people seeing too few impressions, you would see a 40 percent increase in ROI with the same budget. What this means is that for every online campaign there is a “sweetspot” of effective frequency that maximizes return on investment, and that the DataLogix tool can help marketers empirically isolate that sweetspot for each brand and campaign.

Facebook says that digital marketing is shifting its focus from the click to this more typical metric of measuring ad success. According to them, the Datalogix/Facebook tool is a huge step forward in measuring real return on investment for online advertisers.
Of course, this sort of data mining isn’t without its detractors. Two online privacy groups have already asked the FTC to investigate whether or not the partnership with Datalogix violates a previous order from the commission, where Facebook pledged to make “clear and prominent” disclosure of any sharing of nonpublic user information.
Facebook felt compelled to explain their purchase tracking initiative in a post to their privacy page. In it, they emphasize that all dat remains anonymous on their end and on Datalogix’s end:
“Importantly, we have designed this process with privacy at the forefront. We compare hashes of some Facebook data with hashes provided to us by Datalogix. Once we compare, we are able to send corresponding data on the reach of large-scale ad campaigns, which Datalogix uses to create aggregate reports comparing product purchases by large groups of people who did or did not see an ad.
Because of our commitment to privacy, we had an industry-leading auditing firm evaluate the privacy implications of this process. The auditor confirmed that, throughout this process, Datalogix is not allowed to learn more about you from Facebook profile information. Similarly, Datalogix does not send us any of their purchase data, meaning we cannot specifically tell whether or not you purchased a marketer’s product. Finally, with this partnership, Datalogix only sends the marketer aggregate information about large groups of people. None of this data is attributable to an individual Facebook user,” said the company.
Going forward, Facebook will continue to use this tool to show marketers that their money has legs on the Facebook platform. It’ll be up to marketers to decide whether or not digital strategies must move beyond the click.

source: webpronews

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