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[CheekyMammoth]

Drop by our contest at TouchArcade and bookmark this thread. I'll give my best shot at analyzing how our contest influenced sales and whether or not it was a promotional success.

It's a competitive contest with some great prizes:

1st Prize: The new iPad with pirate-themed case.
2nd Prize: The Black Pearl - LEGO pirate ship
3rd Prize: Pirate-themed pocket watch and chain fob

I'm sure you guessed by now that it's a pirate game. With a childhood saturated by Sid Meier's Pirates, how could I resist?!

We also added a Braggin' Rights incentive so that players who have qualified for the prize draw have a reason to keep competing.



It is my contention that this sort of contest encourages more active participation than a simple "LIKE my facebook page" contest. We'll see how that goes.


I'm hoping this thread can act as somewhat of a guide on contests. If you've ever wondered whether a $1000 contest was worth it, but didn't want to risk the money on it, well you can risk my money on it in here! ;-)

Please feel free to be as critical as you like about the contest, but try to remain constructive. Hopefully by the end of the contest this thread will be able to guide other indie developers on how to better conduct a contest for a newly released game. It's tough to get noticed with only 7 Twitter followers lol . . .

Who am I? My name's Paul McPhee. I started out coding open source indie retro re-makes for the Uzebox console. If you're interested in retro gaming and piecing together your own console (hardware and software), check out the Uzebox project and say hi in the forum!

Fans of Josh Whelchel's music might notice his talent in the Cutlass Cove promotional video at the TouchArcade link.

Best regards,
Paul

[CheekyMammoth]

So far we're getting a fairly low level of forum participation, but those who are participating are quite active and enthusiastic. The online leaderboards suggests there are many more participants working away quietly and waiting to post a score when it meets their desired prize cut-off.

It's possible that the contest could have been designed such that people posted more intermediate scores and thus fueled earlier active participation, but I'm not sure yet how that could be done in a way that doesn't annoy people.

One idea might be to have different ending dates for each prize, with the best prizes saved for last. That way people joining late wouldn't feel like they had missed the party, and early participation would be incentivized.

[James Coote]

I'd suspect participation would trail off towards the end as people see they aren't going to make the prizes nor the leaderboard, but I'd be interested to see whether that assertion holds true

Why did you pick the prizes you did?

Also how much time and money have you spent promoting the competition (promoting a promotion )?

[CheekyMammoth]

I'd suspect participation would trail off towards the end as people see they aren't going to make the prizes nor the leaderboard, but I'd be interested to see whether that assertion holds true

Why did you pick the prizes you did?

Also how much time and money have you spent promoting the competition (promoting a promotion )?

I think that participation (ie posting your score in the thread) will accelerate towards the end as players with scores that only qualify for a lesser prize post their score (despite holding out for a better score up until that point). I will be proven wrong if players don't post their score out of disappointment. I think either result will be less than desirable - it's best that players post their intermediate scores to promote discussion and increase the excitement level.

Being a relatively unknown entity, Cheeky Mammoth decided to lean to the side of more generous prizes in order to increase participation in our competition. I think this is a double-edged sword, though. You have to be careful that you don't create an impression that your product needs big prizes to compensate for something else. I think by going for prizes that match the game's theme, you soften the bad edge of this sword. The iPad also fits in with the subject matter and general interests of those visiting that forum.

We have a couple of thousand dollars worth of ads floating around various interest sites. Currently, these ads point to iTunes, but we have the option of altering them. We certainly can't link to a TouchArcade thread, but we may point some of them to our website from which they can find their way to the thread. If we do this, I'll let you know how it goes. Most of the contest's current promotion comes from the very active TouchArcade forums.

[CheekyMammoth]

Hey all,

Our contest has run its course and I'm here to provide my thoughts on it.


Financial Verdict: FAIL

From a financial point of view, our contest would have to be considered a failure. While those who participated were very enthusiastic, there wasn't nearly enough competitors to justify the expense. With roughly 25 actively participating contestants (I suspect there were more who never posted a score), it doesn't justify the nearly 1K in costs. There is also time required to monitor the thread and keep track of everyone's entries, but you can do that on one screen while you code on another, so I don't consider that much of a burden. It's fun to interact with the players, too. There's no way I can determine how many of the nearly 2k downloads are from people who intended to enter the contest, so I won't even try.

Ignoring the expense, why did we only get 25 entrants? I think for two reasons:

i. The entry scores were too difficult for many to achieve.

ii. Most people assume that they'll need to be very lucky to win a random prize draw. Therefore they're less likely to bother entering for a slim chance at winning if they think significant effort is required just to meet the threshold for entry.

iii. Lack of quality exposure.

And I think point i exacerbated point ii in our case. I'm very good at the game and the beta testers ended up being very good at the game. But you can see from the leaderboards that many new players gave up before reaching the first prize threshold. The best players absolutely thrashed the required score levels, but many players must have thought the effort required was too much.

I think that's another danger of running a contest to launch a game: some people who would have bought the game for enjoyment have now bought the game with a mindset of winning something. When it doesn't look like they will realize their goal score (a score they would otherwise not have even considered), they may get disheartened and stop playing your game earlier than they would have if there was no contest in the first place. The goal score tells them that they have failed. Whereas if there was no goal score, there is no intimation of failure.

However, the players who did enter the contest seemed to really enjoy the game.

Regarding point iii: I think a contest like this is more suited to an established company. You can tweet to 50k engaged players and all but guarantee a healthy partipation level. We didn't have the resources to advertise the contest well enough. Our advertising to prize pool ratio was way off.


Community Verdict: PASS

While the contest was not financially profitable, I still don't regret running it. Fans of the game had a really fun time and it's hard to regret that. However, I think they would have had just as much fun if the prize pool's value was a third of what it was. I don't think a larger prize pool (within reason) is enough to override people's expectation of not winning.


Advertising Verdict: FAIL

We did about 2K of advertising and sent out tweets to some 350k people advertising the contest. In our experience, the advertising was minimally helpful (almost no click throughs) and the tweets were a complete waste of money (no change in sales/entrants whatsover). Who knows how many of those 350k followers are genuine or remotely interested. Not many, from what we saw. You'll have to decide how much the flaws in the contest affected these results, but even if you conclude that these flaws had a substantial effect, you'd still expect more than nothing from the tweets if they are supposed to be at all useful.

Conclusion:

Would I suggest you run a launch contest like this? No. You could try a similar contest with a lesser prize pool, but I still wouldn't run it like we did ours. A simple "Like our Facebook page" contest will probably get you far more exposure with far less expense (although it won't be nearly as fun ;-) ).

We have some other promotional ideas that take an entirely different route, so I'll post about them in another thread if they end up being successful.

One last point to anyone considering a contest:

If you do run a contest with a random draw, make sure to not only run it fairly but to be seen to be running it fairly. We recorded the draw and uploaded it to YouTube. An hour prior to the draw we announced when the draw would take place. The recording noted the time on timeanddate.com so that people could verify there had been only one draw. If you're going to get complaints about the fairness of the draw, then they'll likely come after people have lost. So best to prepare early.