Mafia Wars addictive money maker
I’ve just started playing this game called mafia wars, its been floating around as a facebook app, which i had previously ignored, but when a version came out as a free iPhone app, i thought i’d tried it out. Its basically a turnbased resource management game with multiple levels and multiple resources to manage and its incredibally addictive. they company responsible for this game is zynga and they produce a multitude of other games based on the same format.
so Why am i writing about this game? well, put simply its one impressive business, because it is turnbased you have to wait for a fixed amount of time before more turns are credited, a sense of community interactivity and the chance to ‘buy’ special items means its surprisingly competative as well, and whilst the game is free, in order to really’beat’ the game you can gain more resources and ‘buy’ special items and more turns in one of two ways, its here that the real genius is. first you can buy credits, in this way a simple paypal system makes it really easy to purchase and continue playing the game. Realizing that some users won’t pay, there is also two other options – Zynga have google adsense built into the widget giving them revenue for missed clicks, and in addition, they have setup a cash back style system where points are credited towards the game when up complete offers or buy products, a futher variation is that where player might not want to buy things lead-gen offers are also shown, so by encouraging players to fill out online surveys, they get a commission on a lead basis and the player gets extra points towards the game. Granted the quality of the leads may be pretty poor, but there is volume and the predominant user would be a key target group. Last but not least, on facebook, naturally the game has the potential to tap into more of the players information and the voluntary email newsletter is incentivised with more points, again providing Zynga with another marketing opportunity.
Whats more interesting is that whilst the game is simple, a strong storyline, well planned minigames and well structured levels keeps players playing and encourages member get member behaviour, particularly as the game requires multiparty participation for some elements.
Mafia wars really isn’t a new idea, but its a case of doing it better than its predicessors and it takes full advantage of our current obession with facebook and other social media sites.
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