Thursday, July 24, 2008

Getting to know the gaming scene and the game developers communities & social networks



There are many places to expose your work (flash games I mean) via free to use Internet tools. There are social networks, game developers communities and places where most of your kind hangs out. If game exposure is all you need (and it's not as the marketer of your own games), you know enough already and with this short tip you can handle it perfectly: Use social networks to draw the right amount of attention into your blog/site/portal. However, to get really socialized, to take advantages of the free tools, and the special abilities if every network and/or community, you really need to understand the background of each one: Lets take a deep breath and dive into: Kongregate, Newgrounds, Cafe.com, Meez and more.

Kongregate:
K' is unique. Rather then XPOGames.com promising yet to go online social network, Kong is the only place which aims his major themes to three audiences: casual gamers, independent flash games developers and addicted online gamers. Every one can open a profile page, collect friends, badges and get socialized. The community will mostly help you understand what you've done wrong and/or how good or bad is your game. As flash game developer you can join weekly contests, challenge online friends and earn money for being a content creator.
NewGrounds:
NG is also unique. Rather then it's amazing game index, it is a flash portal with movies and art creations with the cool Adobe(/Macromedia) technology. The flash game developers community is hostile. Yes, hostile - they'll kick your aXX virtually and actually। There is great technical help in NG forums, but don't expect anyone to be nice and smile (there wont be any!).
Meez and Cafe are similar, because of it's closed platform। Meez runs currently a great game development contest however it is a close one which you need to use the Meez API in order to make it a Meez game. Cafe is pretty much the same - there are inside games made by professional yet insiders developers.
It's not a gaming platform and i have no need to introduce Facebook to most of you। However you should remember that marketing is finding you audience and give them what they need. Facebook users need to d something so Facebook enabled social games among it's users. You can use others application and/or create your own. By that, you'll get an amazing expuser for your games. Keep i min three things: 1. Social networks are for socializing and time passing, combine them and it's a hit! 2. Facebook always give you the feel that if you don't like what you see/get you ca go fuXX yourself. It's true, and if you'll try otherwise, they'll close your account in no time.3. If you have a personal account in Facebook, use a different more professional 'flash games developer' kind of account.
Well, as long as Myspace is twice as big as Facebook among US users, you should think of getting to know it's new application platform, which suppose to be following the Google openSocial API and therefor makes your application suitable for at list 35 other social networks। Use an application to show your games, and get millions of social eyes on it.
GalonaG.

(Ohhh I almost forgot...this blog is about making money by developing great games, so I have to tell you about Mochiads competitor - BigWig.com, the new kid on the block. Check it out - in games advertising with revenue sharing methods).

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