The Present and Future of Flash Games

If you can find a concept that is simple to grasp, make it enjoyable and incredibly easy to use and then get your user to keep coming back for more, you will have the opportunity of exposing them a greater number of times to your message.

If you can add something as simple as keeping score to make a game competitive you can get people to play over and over. Quirky games have the same effect.

The Burger King Subservient Chicken proved to be extremely effective.

The only disadvantage is that games are more expensive than other kinds of viral marketing.

However, the return from a successful viral game exceeds the initial investment.

The Present: The initial cost of creating a viral game is more than other viral marketing methods but, compared to print campaigns, buying advertising space, radio or television advertising, viral games are a pretty cost-effective way of reaching your market.

The other thing about games which is hard to put a price on is that you can reach your target audience with content that is relevant and interesting to them with ease and, once the game is launched, with very little effort.

There have been a lot of extremely successful campaigns using Flash.

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One of my personal favorites is the Burger King Subservient Chicken simply because when it came out it was a new concept and it has spawned several copycats since, which is always a good sign of a successful campaign.

The biggest problem today is connection speed. The game must be streamlined and kept catchy and easy to use.

Broadband is slowly getting rid of the download time problem.

Other problems revolve around restricted technology within businesses. Companies sometimes block Flash in their company machines because of security concerns.

JavaScript is, also, occasionally blocked.

The Future: The distant future in the world of cyberspace is within the next two years…things move fast.

Viral games will be pushed to mobiles and be made location-based.

Won’t it be fun when the game you are playing on the bus is using your location to provide clues to get you to a certain retail outlet to collect a prize?

That is going to happen.

Multiplayer viral games are going to be on the move and once they are multiplayer kids at school will be playing them, people will be playing them with their fellow commuters on the train to work…the games are going to spread like wildfire.

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