The 2 Types of Marketing Games You Need to Know

In the modern digital landscape, leveraging games for marketing is more important than ever. Games can help capture the attention of potential customers, build brand awareness, and even drive lead generation. By offering prizes, running contests, and utilizing social media, brands are able to reach a larger audience and create a community that will grow and engage the campaign. With the right marketing strategy, games can be a powerful tool for boosting business.

Skill-Based Games

In any competitive sport or game with prizes, there are always a bad few apples trying to break the system. Source: Unsplash

There are several counter-measures to prevent players from sending a fake score. One of which is to compare the time of when game starts and ends to calculate the feasibility of the score. While this works, like any Batman villain, our crafty nemesis will always find a way to cause some chaos.

For this reason, we don’t often recommend a web skill-based game when there are prizes involved unless it is a turn-based multiplayer. Having a pool of players actively playing against each other would allow each game client to validate each other’s actions, thereby coming to a consensus before it is recorded in the server.

In any competitive sport or game with prizes, there are always a bad few apples trying to break the system. Source: Unsplash

“Luck-based” Games

Without sugar-coating it, we’ll be direct about what this means; Lootboxes, slot machines, casino games, spin the wheel, or Pop Mart mystery box! These are games which have their outcomes completely determined by the server. All the winnings and losings are done off the player’s device, meaning there is no way the player is able to send a false result to the central database.

You might be thinking, wait a minute - Isn’t this gambling? That is a major point to consider. In Malaysia, any game which involve elements of chance are governed by the Malaysian Common Gaming Houses Act 1953 (“CGHA”) and the Malaysian Lotteries Act 1952 (“MLA”).

Section 2 of the CGHA defines “gaming” to be the playing of any game of chance, or of mixed chance and skill, for money or money’s worth. A Promotion that involves some degree of skill but mixed with an element of chance could potentially be regarded as “gaming”.

It’s important to draw a clear distinction that your promotional game is not a gambling machine behind-the-scenes.

The right way to run a legal “lucky draw” would be to award prizes only to the first 10 quickest participants versus a game that awards prizes to randomly selected participants. If that’s too predictable, one can also determine the winner by first 20 odd numbered submissions or something in that pattern.

Clean Data

Regardless of whether you choose to deploy a skill-based or “luck-based” game, you want to make sure that any submissions of interest from your participants are legitimate. An easy validation method would be to request for email verification to ensure that the user is registering for the competition with a real address. However, a savvy user would use a proxy or temporary email akin to those secretive burner phones you see in movies undertaking dodgy activities. Unfortunately, this is the same for phone SMS.

While these deterrents are helpful for filtering your incoming data, it’s important to be mindful that some unusable data will slip through the cracks. To prevent this, custom filtering rules can be written and passed through the database to validate them. To know more about this, reach out to our team at Weyrdworks for a free consultation.

The Right Game

There you have it. Running a promotional campaign with a simple game may seem like a trivial task. But with any endeavour, a layered list of caveats and pitfalls awaits anyone who dares attempt it the first time. At Weyrdworks, we’ve built several dozen high quality game experiences for a variety of applications and are still constantly battling new challenges. If you have a game idea and want to take it to the next phase with an professional game company, reach out to our team for a chat.