The new Augmented Reality (AR) mobile game will be available for basketball fans of all ages with special launch events planned for Las Vegas running July 12-15 and in other North American cities leading up to the 2018/19 NBA season.

ePlay is working with 7-time NBA champion, Robert Horry and a fantastically talented group of young basketball players that will be wearing the Big Shot logo throughout the summer to promote the Big Shot mobile game.

We’re told that the company also released a new website for its upcoming game series at www.BigShotAR.com.

“This is going to be a big summer for ePlay and for augmented reality,” says Trevor Doerksen, CEO of ePlay Digital. “We are advancing the state-of-art for sports and mobile technology and look forward to seeing hundreds of thousands of fans of all ages enjoying the magic that our augmented reality platform creates.”

To learn more, click here.

The post ePlay Touts Big Shot AR Beta Launch appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is an exclusive guest contributed post from Mark Robinson, CEO of game analytics and marketing company deltaDNA.

The rise of F2P gaming has introduced a non-native apex predator into the gaming world: Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Widely adopted in app marketing in the form of automated emails and push notifications, game marketers have embraced it. But when it comes to improving player retention and engagement, it might not work as well as you think.

The new way to view F2P games

Firmly established in B2B and retail loyalty marketing for decades, CRM started out as the practice of collecting contact details and logging sales engagements. In the past, game marketers themselves didn’t engage in CRM; the stores that sold games would mail offers and use rewards cards to develop customer loyalty. But with F2P, everything has changed.

At the heart of every F2P game is a store and much of the gameplay itself can be seen as marketing to drive customers to that store. This is clearly a cynical view; F2P games provide enjoyable and free experiences to millions of players every day. However, it is also true that for profitable F2P games, many game design decisions are driven by the end goal of convincing players to spend real money.

In this way, F2P games should be viewed like any marketplace, and hence the traditional CRM techniques of relationship building with carefully targeted offers and brand engagements, are all applicable.

Illogical use of CRM in games

The reality of this can be seen in the types of messaging in modern F2P games. Almost all F2P games have starter and bundle offers that are displayed to the player at game launch or at another key moment in gameplay. Most have VIP loyalty schemes that offer unique content and rewards to spending players to try to keep them spending regularly. These are traditional CRM techniques that have been adapted for use in the gaming world.

Many other CRM techniques borrowed from the commercial world are used throughout F2P game marketing, but their effectiveness is hampered by the fact that most CRM is reactive, i.e. it waits for the customer to do something and then it kicks in with messaging.

This makes sense for a typical e-commerce retail customer; someone puts something into their online shopping basket but doesn’t purchase, so then you send them a discount voucher. However, this logic doesn’t work for games, as waiting for something bad to happen is typically too late to interact with the player.

A good example of this is player churn. Many games will send push notifications (or emails) if a player has been inactive for some period (e.g. a week). They may make an amazing offer to the player of free, or heavily discounted, content or virtual currency. However, this doesn’t address the underlying reason the player has churned in the first place; they got bored or frustrated with the game. This is why CRM in games needs to be proactive; i.e. they should step-in before the negative outcome occurs and steer the player towards a positive one. Instead, you should think of it as Player Relationship Management (PRM).

What works: Practical steps to improve KPIs

To improve KPIs, a much deeper understanding of players is required than simple CRM can achieve. Identifying lapsed players requires only login data. Identifying bored or frustrated players needs data that reveals playing style and how it has changed over time.

Retaining players through PRM requires careful game design, as well as messaging. A player could become bored and leave if they have completed all the core content in the game. One way to retain them with messaging would be to highlight and reward challenging tasks (e.g. finish mission 2 in under 2 minutes and get 10 gold). Another would be to more carefully spread out game content so players cannot complete it so quickly.

Churn is not the only example where proactive PRM is needed. Player conversion and repeat spending can also be radically improved. Again, this is because the underlying reasons why most players don’t spend is not that it is too expensive, but that IAP content is not appealing.

PRM addresses this by funneling players to outcomes where they will naturally want to spend. This requires a combination of game design and personalized messaging. A simple example of this currently used in games, is locked loot drops, where keys need to be purchased with premium currency. Another example is combining gifting and monetization, e.g. gacha style daily rewards where the chance of a rare item can be boosted with premium currency. In both of these examples, players are effectively acquainted with the types of items that are available to them and the benefits of rare ones that are eventually only accessible via spending.

PRM vs CRM?

While PRM in F2P game marketing borrows a lot from traditional CRM, it requires a lot more creativity and an understanding of your players that only deep data can offer. Bulk emailing all your players a discount code on Friday may still generate a boost in revenue, but it is much more likely to lead to player churn.

A highly targeted intervention based on gameplay style or activity will undoubtedly be far more effective.

The gains that can be made by properly integrating PRM and game design are massive, so perhaps it’s time to adopt a more proactive approach towards your player relationships.

The post F2P Game Marketing: Why CRM’S Not Working appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Part operator of social games, part advertising network, RockYou doesn’t sit still. Now it has announced its acquisition of mobile ad network PlayHaven from former parent company Science.

“The acquisition of PlayHaven, which has bounced around a bit, shows how RockYou is accelerating its push into mobile gaming and transforming itself into a new kind of business, as much about advertising and media as it is about gaming,” notes Venture Beat Magazine (VBM).

The San Fran-headquartered RockYou is experiencing a turnaround led by chief executive Lisa Marino.

“This is very strategic for the company, as we got very big in online and in 2015 we are making a very big push into mobile,” Marino said in an interview with GamesBeat before the speech. “Our acquisition pipeline for 2015 is exclusively mobile.”

RockYou, however, still specializes in making money from advertising and other monetization from social games on the web.

“Our goal is to repeat what we did in the online world with mobile,” Marino said. “We didn’t have the tech or publisher relationships to start that from scratch. This is a big catalyst and game changer for us.”

Marino sees the company as — among other things — a great “aggregator of audiences.”

“We have become a preeminent aggregator of audiences around the world,” said Marino. “PlayHaven is a great foundation for us to build on, and for our mobile games like Kitchen Scramble and Words of Wonder, as well as future games we’ll announce soon. We also look forward to connecting PlayHaven’s network to our private market of video ads from Fortune 1000 companies.”

Once PlayHaven is fully integrated into its business, RockYou’s mobile slice should rise to 30 percent.

The post We Will, We Will RockYou: Gamer Company Acquires PlayHaven In Move to Mobile Marketplace appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

With good retention rates being so important to the success of mobile games, the partners explain in a joint statement, understanding which campaigns and which channels deliver engaged users is critical.

However, acquisition is only one piece of the puzzle; developers must also understand how those players are engaging with the game and be able to predict their lifetime value (LTV).

This partnership, the announcement continues, brings together two industry leading analytics platforms to create an integrated solution.

In short, deltaDNA users can now understand the effectiveness of their acquisition strategy by being able to combine data about acquisition channels with predictive models to understand which sources are generating engaged, revenue-generating users.

Conversely, AppsFlyer’s clients “can now extend their player knowledge by accessing deltaDNA’s pro-level analytics and player engagement tools, giving them the power to segment their user-base and deliver more personalized game environments to increase engagement and foster long-term relationships with players.”

“Many developers lie awake at night worrying about the effectiveness of their acquisition spend,” says Mark Robinson, CEO of deltaDNA. “The combination of deltaDNA’s LTV and Retention predictive models with AppsFlyer data allows developers to make early decisions about their acquisition strategy.

The post deltaDNA, AppsFlyer Join Forces for Player Engagement appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In making the change, VentureBeat confirms, Adaptiv.io joins the growing ranks of companies that help their clients target customers and induce them to spend not only more time with their games but, more importantly, more money.

David Lee, cofounder and president of the company, says the reason for the change is that “we don’t think the solutions out there are benefiting marketing managers based on our service.” Their new event automation engine is highly customizable and allows publishers and marketers to not only increase user engagement but also monetization of their games using the latest technology for cross channel and cross-platform marketing.

The company comes with quite a bit of “street cred” after working for several years with Disney on their Disney Infinity game, Activision on their Call of Duty Elite game and also Bethesda with their The Elder Scrolls Online.

After all of that time developing games for other companies, and a failed bid to publish their own, Adaptiv.io is now helping app developers to determine the best way to not only attract new users to their games but also to keep them playing. This is especially important when you consider that, with most games, up to 80% of players don’t come back to play after they’ve played a game for the first time.

Their event automation engine gathers analytics on gamers and then uses that data to target them with strategies created to increase retention and monetization. The program can go as far as targeting the specific behavior of customers and, using that behavior, modify a game’s promotions, pricing and incentives.

Lee says that “Automation is becoming the fastest growing customer relationship management segment, enabling marketers to engage with their customers across many platforms,” and, with their new technology and programs, Adaptiv.io is helping to greatly increase that engagement.

The post Getting in the Game – Sleepy Giant Switches from Game Maker to Game Marketing Guru appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

So far, they are seeing over half off all traffic to Beat the Leader coming from smartphones and mobile devices.

Not just that, but mobile availability has drastically increased participation in all off their 90+ restaurants. They have well over 1,000 regular participants this year, with approximately 6,000 coming from mobile devices.

As one of the added draws of taking their popular game mobile, mobile allows for a larger range of ways in which customers can engage with and challenge other players from around the nation. Shrewdly, Old Chicago even implemented some great digital rewards for players.

Old Chicago partnered with Movement Strategy to create their new digital game, which is proving to be an overwhelming success.

“With the improvements to the mobile experience we’re aiming for a 90 percent retention rate week over week – meaning users are returning to make picks and view leaderboards,” Eric Dieter, co-founder of Movement Strategy tells Mobile Commerce Daily. “In 2013 this was just over 70 percent.”

The post Old Chicago Takes Their Football Challenge Mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

To that end, Swrve has recently raised $10 million to fuel a sales, marketing, and engineering expansion.

According to a post at VentureBeat, “The second round of funding is one of the first tasks accomplished by Christopher Dean, who became chief executive of San Francisco-based Swrve three months ago.”

Swrve’s claim to fame?

For starters, Swrve has proven helpful to gamemakers as well as mobile-app companies. Its customer base includes more than 100 firms. Additionally, Swrve now has more than 500 million unique device identities, and it processes more than 3 billion events every day. Current clients include Activision, Warner Brothers, Beamly, Electronic Arts, and Tagged.

The companies use Swrve to find out data about their best users, what their preferences are, and how to get them engaged with a game. It offers multivariate testing of options, a dashboard for easier analysis, and an ability to personalize the user’s experience with an app in real-time.

“As our conventional understanding of ‘e-commerce’ becomes increasingly obsolete and more and more consumers conduct business via mobile devices, it is platforms like Swrve that will control and grow the consumer relationship,” said Dean. “Our vision is to orchestrate the messages and content around data and increase the retention of users to make them lifelong customers. We are moving to nontechnical customers in a wide variety of markets, and this capital will enable us to reach them quickly and efficiently.”

The post Mobile Marketing Automation Company Swrve Raises $10M to Fuel Expansion appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In fact, NativeX recently announced the launch of its global native ad exchange designed to best monetize free-to-play mobile games.

NativeX says its exchange is the first and only mobile ad exchange built for mobile games, which attract the most activity on iOS and Android devices by far, but are extremely difficult for most developers to monetize.
So how does it work?

Using predictive analytics, the NativeX ad exchange was built to maximize ad revenue for reward and non-reward ad campaigns, regardless of conversion type (CPM, CPC, CPI, CPE, or CPV), including video, interstitials and multi-offer ads (reward and non-reward), as well as featured offer alerts (reward only).

“The mobile game market can’t fully prosper until native ad solutions mature into native monetization tools, and it’s become our mission to focus on mobile game monetization to drive the market to realize its potential,” explains Robert Weber, SVP and co-founder of NativeX. “It is no longer just about targeting the right ad to the right user at the right time. Game developers have unique opportunities to make more money from advertising based on their in-game economies. Our NativeX ad exchange extracts maximum value from every single ad impression.”

To learn more about this innovative new exchange, check it out here.

The post Mobile Games the Focus of New Native Ad Exchange appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Since the birth of iOS and Android, mobile-focused start-ups such as Kiip, SessionM and others have been profitable by way of their creation of an advertising model built on incentivizing consumers with game credits, points on credit cards, or brand samples in exchange for consuming mobile ads or brand content.

“It is an interesting concept that diverges from traditional digital display advertising tactics, but with Facebook, Google and Twitter grabbing an ever-more dominant share of the mobile ad landscape, rewards-based mobile ads are tremendous equalizers for the ‘little guys’ in the game,” recently observed Kevin Cosenza of NativeMobile.

SessionM CEO Lars Albright insists that SessionM’s rewards-based model is exactly what today’s market demands. “What’s really resonating is direct relationships with consumers,” Albright explains.

Last month, SessionM announced a partnership with Punchcard, a shopping app that rewards consumers for completing in-store purchases at over 15 million locations. Consumers who use the Punchcard app will receive mPOINTS (mobile points), SessionM’s mobile loyalty point system, each time they make a purchase at a local business and take a photo of the receipt with the Punchcard app.

If you’re not a fan of free apps and games with incentivized ads, you’re out of luck. According to some industry analysts, the day is fast approaching when 95% of all mobile apps will be free, but heavily ad supported.

The post Incentivizing Mobile Ads is All Fun and Games appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That’s right, the maker of Candy Crush is cashing in and going public.

Following its April 2012 launch, everyone and their mother has been playing Candy Crush, a contemporary variation of familiar match-three games. Each level sports a game board colorfully littered with different candies and obstacles to their alignment – the basic challenge of this game.

On Tuesday, King Digital Entertainment, the company behind the game, filed for an initial public offering of stock in search of at least $500 million in financing and a massive multibillion-dollar valuation.

King confirmed that Candy Crush now generates close to 80 percent of the company’s revenue, which approached $2 billion by the end of last year.

“The IPO will include shares offered by the company as well as those offered by existing stockholders,” The AP reports. “The Dublin-based company, which has offices in Sweden, London, San Francisco and elsewhere, plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘KING.'”

The post Mobile Gives Rise to What May Be Wall Street's Most Addictive Stock appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.