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Getting the Word Out: The Media Blitz

We’re a relatively new independent studio working on web games, with our first big release of “Papa Louie: When Pizzas Attack” in late 2006. While we can’t claim to have the same depth of experience as Simon at Ezone, I encourage everyone to take a look at his great article, as we’ve experienced some great success with nearly the same self-publishing strategy as he mentions – so it’s not only veterans that can succeed with this model!

We license our games to a number of portals, including Shockwave and Miniclip, but a large part of our distribution centers around releasing the game on our own site. Of course, our small game site doesn’t have nearly the exposure of a large portal like Shockwave, so when we release a new game we have to get the word out to bring in traffic.

If you decide to self-publish and release a game on your own site, we’ve found that a great tactic to capture this essential traffic is the “media blitz”: Send out emails and submissions to a number of sites heralding the game’s release, in hopes that these sites will link to it or frame it. It does take some time and effort to get it to work, but the resulting exposure and ad revenue can be very rewarding.

Preparing for the Media Blitz

You’ll first need to have your game uploaded to your own site. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, we’ve gotten away with a single SWF on an all-black page. Make sure your hosting can support high levels of bandwidth (around 1,000 – 2,000 GB / month), and make sure you domain-lock the game to your site. With all of the upcoming traffic, there will be plenty of visitors trying to steal the game for their own sites.

The main stream of revenue will be from advertising on your own site. Sign up with Google AdSense for your page, and set up the Channels under AdSense so advertisers can better target your site. Use a couple types of ads surrounding the game – banner above, skyscraper down the side, links below, etc. We’ve had much higher revenue from ads above and to the right of the game than we have elsewhere on the page.

Also sign up for MochiAds for preroll and interstitial ads inside your Flash game. Be warned, however, that much of the traffic from our media blitzes has come from outside the US, where MochiAds rates are usually lower. While we’re getting lots of international traffic, this is a great opportunity to switch out the paid ads for a custom ad pointing to one of our other game releases – driving more traffic to other AdSense-supported pages on our site.

It’s also a good idea to get an account with MochiBot to track your SWF usage, and sign up for Google Analytics and/or StatCounter to track the HTML page your game is in. Measuring the hit difference between the SWF and its HTML can be helpful (more on that later).

Spread the Word

When your game is uploaded and ready for release, it’s time to spread the word and let the world know where to play it. First prepare a press release or brief description / tagline to include in your emails, complete with a link to the playable game online.

Target many different types of sites as you spread the word: News and link aggregates (Digg, StumbleUpon, NewsToday), gaming blogs (JayIsGames, FreeGamesNews, Destructoid), and game portals.

It’s also a good idea to do some Google searches for other popular games to see what sites they pop up on. Be sure to add these sites to your distro list for your press release.

Results of the Media Blitz

After the media blitz, keep an eye on your MochiBot and Analytics to track the traffic you are getting to the site. When word gets out about your game, there are a number of things that can happen as a result of the media blitz:

Blogs and game sites will link to your game.
This is obviously one of the intended results of the media blitz, driving traffic to your site. Congrats for getting their attention!
Game portals will frame your game on their site (ads exposed).
This is another good result, and can often bring in a large amount of income for the game.
While many game portals receive their games through sponsorship and licensing, there are countless game portals (many outside the US) that rely only on showing games on their site by “framing” an existing game webpage. With this method, portals can keep their site branding intact (at least as a banner), and will reveal your existing game page without stealing your SWF file. On the downside, you’re stuck with the bandwidth costs for letting their visitors play your game. If the portal makes the frame wide enough to show your Google Ads, however, the portal’s high amount of traffic could be bringing in some great rates for your AdSense.
Game portals will frame your game, and hide your ads.
Unfortunately not every game portal is looking to help you out with ad revenue – many portals will squeeze the frame small enough so only the game SWF is visible and your ads are completely hidden. This one is a losing situation, as you’ll be paying for bandwidth costs and getting no AdSense revenue in return. MochiAds can be helpful in these cases, though for non-US traffic the revenue can be low.

Game portals will try to steal your game.
This is where site-locking becomes very important. Some portals will try to steal your SWF to host it on their site – cutting you out of the revenue stream completely. If you’ve site-locked your game, however, you can have a stolen file display a warning screen with a link back to your site.

Game portals will embed your game into their pages.
This one gets a bit tricky – even without stealing your SWF file, a portal can set up their own page that uses your game on your hosting as its source. This one can become a problem just like #3 above, and the best way to find out if this is happening is by cross-checking your HTML hits (through Analytics or StatCounter) versus the SWF hits (through MochiBot). If your SWF is getting tens of thousands more hits than your HTML page, this is probably the cause.

My advice is to change your game filename often on your site: Leave the HTML page the same (as other sites are hopefully linking to it and framing it), but change the SWF file name to something else. Whenever you notice a difference between the HTML and SWF hits, change the filename again – people will eventually get tired of updating their code.

Game portals will ask to license your game.
Aside from the portals that rely on framing games, you may also get contacted by game portals who deal in non-exclusive licenses. Make sure you have your contact information either on your site or in your game!

Conclusion

Keep in mind that there are plenty of wild cards with this method – we’ve had periods where all of the sites were hiding our Google ads (earning very little), and times when a couple sites with high traffic had our ads exposed (lots of quick income). It’s always fluctuating and different for each game, so it’s tough to bank on the sort of income you can make from this method. It’s a great supplement to typical licensing deals, and if you go the sponsorship route but can still place the game on your own site, give it a shot – and good luck!