DISQUS

Thanks, Gaurav.

(Sorry it took me so long to respond!)

I do remember the first email I sent you. ^__^

Hugs back atcha.

Just wrote a response to your experiment on my blog:

http://prettybluesalwar.blogspot.com/2008/04/on...

To wit: it's comparing a life of chosen frugality vs. a life of enforced frugality.

Would love if you would address this issue in a future post. ^__^

I have never found housework to be a barrier to thought. I have plenty of daydreamy insights while housecleaning.

What housework does, for me, is eats up time I could be using to transfer those insights into action.

But you're a marketer! You know full well that most products are positioned to appear to be necessities when they actually aren't.

Are you suggesting that your year will be punctuated by impulse buys based on a hunch (or an advertising-manipulated desire) that you actually need them? :)

The people who have published books on non-consumption set very strict rules at the beginning of their projects, and then wrote about when they followed them and when they broke them -- and why.

A variant that hasn't yet been done -- and which might suit you as a marketer -- would be to set a small period of time (say, 30 days) in which you didn't buy anything -- had to make do with the food in your cupboards, etc. -- and watched as many commercials/advertising as you had time to view, and documented how the attempt to create a psychological need which you COULD NOT fulfill affected you over the course of the project.

Are you familiar with No Impact Man?

He did the same thing last year and got a book/movie deal out of it.

www.noimpactman.com

See, that's why when I realized Twitter was starting to become popular, I thought "aw, sh*t... another thing to monitor and check... and this one updates so d*mn frequently... do I have to participate if I want to stay on top of the social curve?"

So yes. Bring it.

Congratulations! Great news!

I’m told that mobile gaming (in India) attracts a different — less geeky — audience from PC/ console games.

Gasp! Did you just imply I was geeky?! ^__^

So per-play is less than Rs. 10? How often does the player have to pay? Every time the player begins the game (and then has an unlimited number of "turns" until he/she stops the game), or every time the player loses a turn?

For me that would be a prohibiting factor, but again that's for me alone. I know that there are people who have no problem dropping cash on things like that. I mean, sure, that was the entire principle of the old-school video arcade and plenty of people dumped money into those things.

The most successful model I've seen in terms of getting people to pay (by which I mean "it got me to pay") isn't the "pay-per-turn" kind of thing, but the "pay to unlock." Give the gamers enough game to get hooked and then make them pay to access special features, levels, etc.

My telling you this is probably like the pot asking the kettle "have you ever thought of trying to sell people on "premium" or "exclusive" content?" ^__^ So I won't elaborate.

But your original question was about how to share the risk with the game developer. Perhaps in a scenario like this the developer is building new "premium" material over a period of time; that is to say, if you both start out with the base game and a few premium components, then if the premium stuff sells you can pay the developer for more premium components which can then be sold to the gamer.

There. I have solved all of your problems. ^__^

This may be a lengthy comment, but since I am a veteran and consummate gamer, as it were, this touches on a subject very dear to my heart. ^__^

This is the catch I see with the "brand-centric" chart.

If you let your users download for free (and then pay for multiple plays), if the game is any good people will figure out how to get around the "paying" part. Someone will hack it and then share the info online, etc.

I've never heard the word "advergaming" before, but I can guess what it means. ^__^ (It's a word that only stays on one side of the desk, right? No one goes out to the public and says "play our new advergame?")

So I checked out Jump Games and looked into their advergames.

Let's see.

"Bingo! Chips Factory
Go Bingo! A Mobile advergame developed for ITC to advertise their new smackalicious product line of Bingo! Chips."

No gamer is going to pay money to play Bingo! Chips Factory. (On the plus side, no one is going to try to hack Bingo! Chips Factory either.) And if you want money, you're going to have to crack the gamer market.

The way I see it -- and I'm not a marketing person -- you'd have to make a deal with the phone company to have Bingo! Chips Factory installed on the phone (and free, like Tetris), and work out the money deal that way. If a person is comparing two phones and one has a bunch of games, even if they're advergames, the game phone will win -- or at least it would for me.

So then it becomes about mobile sales instead of about game downloads or pay-per-click sales.

Or you figure out a way to include product placement in another, cooler mobile game. Bipasha Bapu jet-skiing? I'd play that. She could snarf down some Bingo! Chips in a cut-scene after I won a level.

And I'd pay to download it one time, but I wouldn't pay-per-game. If it were really cool I'd find a way around paying, and if it were lame I just wouldn't bother paying (or playing) at all.

Sorry if this seems patronizing or full of stuff you already know. Again, I'm not a marketer, just a gamer. ^__^