TriplePoint PR

Bolt Creative’s iPhone game, Pocket God, is one of the most successful games in the App Store. They have sold over 2 million units in a little over one year. Furthermore, the game has accumulated a loyal fan base—an impressive feat that many games never achieve. Bolt Creative’s success in building a strong following can be credited, in part, to their genuine appreciation of and attentiveness to the Pocket God community.

When the game was new to the scene, Bolt Creative CEO, Dave Castelnuovo, would check out fan comments and gather real feedback. He made sure that players who spent $0.99 to download Pocket God knew that their voices were being heard and that their comments would be taken into account by responding to both praise and criticism. It is important to offer fans a communication channel to share their opinions. Now there is an array of useful tools available to monitor and manage comments on various social network sites so that it is easier. Castelnuovo recommends, however, having a presence on a limited selection of social networking sites rather than trying to be everywhere. He suggests choosing a format that suits your strengths and focusing your energy there, specifically.

More than a year after its initial launch, Pocket God continues to top the App Store charts with over two million copies sold. Bolt Creative’s Dave Castelnuovo and Allen Dye keep the craze, well, crazy, through clever content updates, community engagement and tons of humor.

The benevolent deities on the PR team help keep Pocket God’s name in lights through quality media hits. Here’s a recap of the latest and greatest:

Bloomberg TV
Venture CES Edition – Broadcast and Online (1/22)
Dave Castelnuovo speaks on the Pocket God demographic, pricing strategy and the future of the brand.

NBC’s “press:here”
Episode 42, Part 2 – Broadcast and Online (1/31)
Dave joins the weekly Silicon Valley news roundtable to discuss app development and the iPad.

To protect the innocent, names have been changed. In this publication, a once-faithful iPhone lover will be referred to with a fictional Twitter name: @madluv4iPhn.

A recent tweet:

@madluv4iPhn Dear iPhone – I’ve met someone new named the Nexus One. I’m strangely attracted to her and need a few days to figure this all out.

I initiated a conversation with @madluv4iPhn to understand his reasons for leaving his iPhone.  The first reason he provided is that the Nexus One serves as a much better telephone than the iPhone. Inconsistent coverage has been a general gripe of the iPhone user population. The Nexus One provides more consistent service with improved sound quality and fewer dropped calls.  To be fair, iPhone’s AT&T service is greatly responsible for the frustrating inconsistency of their calls. Interestingly enough, T Mobile has served the Nexus One very well so far, despite its general criticism for inconsistent coverage.

Earlier this week, New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Center played host to a convergence of two trade shows, as both the 107th American International Toy Fair and Engage! Expo welcomed a diverse group of exhibitors and speakers.  For certain attendees, the pairing of Toy Fair with the Engage! Expo, a conference that focused primarily on virtual goods, might have at first seemed somewhat out-of-place.  Beyond the giant stuffed animals, puzzle games, and highly popular robotic hamsters that populated much of Toy Fair, Engage! showcased  leading entrepreneurs in the new digital retail phenomenon – the virtual goods industry.

As reported by Inside Network and covered here on TriplePointPR.com, this year, the virtual goods industry is projected to drive $1.6 billion in revenue in the U.S. alone.  While the ability to purchase virtual goods has existed in online communities for quite some time now, the phenomenon that is social gaming hasushered in a brand new audience for microtransaction purchases – the general consumer.

While traditional retailers and toymakers struggle to survive the stormy and rather unpredictable economic recession, the virtual goods industry is booming.  Selling non-physical items, the providers of virtual goods have seen just as much (and presumably more) success than long time brands and veterans of the physical toy industry present at the Javits Center this week.  The reason for such success is simple – the provider of the virtual good, which can be looked upon as a modern toy manufacturer, is smarter and armed with more consumer information than the producer of the antiquated physical retail toy.

Social Gold, the premier virtual economy platform, has recently shared some intriguing facts on users’ spending behavior within social games. Social Gold offers users a seamless in-game payments experience so players can purchase virtual goods without disrupting gameplay. New stats that were recently  posted on Social Gold’s blog show that their virtual economy platform increases conversion and drives repeat purchases.

Brewnanza (in case you missed the first or second posts) is an end-of-week office gathering intended to expand our collective knowledge and appreciation for craft beer – a market we’re eagerly looking to offer our services to. In fact, since the last post, we’ve added a page detailing the services we’d like to offer to craft brewers!

We’ve also just kicked off a casual blog over at Brewnanza.com, reporting on industry news we find interesting, and detailing our various beer adventures.

San Francisco Beer Week starts today (not to mention the fact that February is 21st Amendment and Magnolia’s 8th annual Strong Beer Month), and we’ll be at the SF Brewer’s Guild’s opening gala event tonight to partake in the delicious wares and meet some of the best brewers in the business.

This time, we report on our San Francisco crew’s thoughts on the Hefeweizen and Brown Ale styles.

Inside Network recently released a report that the virtual goods market is expected to drive $1.6 billion in revenue in the U.S. in 2010. The market is driven in large part by virtual items sold in social games, which account for $835 million of the total sales projected. While publishers such as Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and Serious Business are hard at work creating the content and engagement mechanisms to drive sales, payments solutions such as Social Gold (online), Zong (mobile), Open Network Entertainment, Inc. (prepaid cards) and the newly launched Kwedit (cash) are striving to help customers purchase those virtual goods seamlessly.

I’m a lucky man – every day I get to work with and talk to some of the most excellent people in technology, both client and reporter-side.

Hence I’m not sure why I was so surprised when, out of nowhere, a chance encounter with Armor Games founder Daniel McNeely led to working on the iPhone version of one of my favorite flash games, Crush The Castle.

The challenge, however, was getting press for a game that while recently, significantly updated, was months old. Great as a game is, many PR firms would have said that the press (and the consumer) can tend to have a short memory – and that if something is considered ‘old news,’ it’s mostly left to the dogs.

LEGO Universe made its public debut at CES – the Consumer Electronics Show – earlier this month  (January 7-10, 2010). Attendees, including press of course, were able to get their hands on the game for the very first time, and the first game trailer was released in conjunction with the show. Attendees were also the first pioneers able to sign up for the LEGO Universe beta test, slated to begin in the next few months.

LEGO Universe will bring LEGO worlds alive, in the first MMOG – massively multiplayer online game – based on the iconic brick-building play experience. Developed by NetDevil, LEGO Universe will launch for PC in the second half of 2010. So what did CES-attending media think? Here are some reactions to the game demo and trailer:

Over the last year, the number of retro and classic console and arcade games on the iPhone has dramatically increased, often providing these much-beloved chestnuts with a new lease on life (and great success for their publishers). Classic characters such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Earthworm Jim, Guybrush Threepwood and Dirk the Daring are back in full force, with more characters set to make a comeback on the horizon.

Sonic the Hedgehog for iPhone

How have these once-antiquated characters found new relevancy on a new medium? Beyond the obvious nostalgia factor, it all boils down to gameplay, fun, and interesting game design. The most popular games from the 80s and 90s still resonate with gamers today. In the “golden era” of 16- and 32-bit graphics, game designers couldn’t rely on whiz-bang visuals, environmental physics and detailed rendering to impress gamers. Games were distilled down to their simplest elements: pick-up-and-play ease, addictive fun and compelling gameplay.

This story is a bit old by internet standards, but it’s important and helpful for app developers out there who want to DIY their PR.

TriplePoint can help you design and execute a PR strategy, sure, but we would be doing a disservice if we did not also highlight instances where a PR strategy went terribly awry.

Perhaps this should be common sense, but when contacting media to promote your app/game/product/service, don’t offer money in exchange for coverage.

The Portable Gamer details a shocking exchange with an Australian app developer who was willing to pay $300 for an app review. When the site appropriately declined, the developer upped the offer to $500.

The conversation proceeded to an exchange of threats and insults launched by the developer, with the site politely asking to end communication. The result was not exposure for the developer or their app but rather the Portable Gamer bringing the matter to the public’s attention. By doing so, they discovered that the same developer had made similar attempts with other editorial sites.

This year’s CES kicked off a massive 3D trend, with everyone from Sony to RealD showing the latest 3D-enabled products at show. No longer relegated to the holodeck on Star Trek or the Matrix in, well, The Matrix, it looks as if 3D is here to stay. Here’s a look at some of the major announcements and what analysts are predicting for 3D in 2010.

The major push this year was to move 3D from the movie theater to the home theater. RealD, the company that turns Disney movies into three-dimensional thrill rides, is working with a range of partners from Samsung and Panasonic to bring 3D-ready TVs to market.

The gaming world in the united states has very few large- or medium-capitalization companies that specialize in video games.   Waves of consolidation (Maxis, Broderbund) or bankruptcy (3DO, Acclaim) has swept out many of the historic publicly traded videogame companies as capitalism’s creative destruction did not spare gamers.   Much of the US-based gaming market capitalization is effectively part of Microsoft. But with only 1.9 of Microsoft’s 12.9 billion in revenues coming from the Entertainment and Devices division in the last reported quarter, and an even smaller percentage of operating profit (312 million of 4.48 billion) it is arguable after many earlier years of losses whether this was a worthwhile extension of shareholder capital.   Other sections of the videogame industry are submerged into entertainment conglomerates.  There, alas, they are financially black sheep.   Even occasional large hits such as Beatles Rock Band compete against intellectual property  siblings, ”are negative for margins” and Viacom hopes to break-even on it based on the holiday results.   The division-level picture is worse — Disney Interactive is “still in the investment phase”: losing $295 million last quarter.   When the combined results of Disney and Microsoft’s gaming divisions are more or less a wash, there’s a problem in the maturation of the industry.  The occasional frenzy whipped up by bankers that there is about to be a wave of consolidations by the entertainment conglomerates of the game distributors shrivels under the glare of these green eye shades.

The Conrad Foundation is a non-profit science education organization that connects brilliant high school students with today’s science and business leaders to foster an educational community to inspire the next generation of innovators. Before I go on, you should know that TriplePoint represents The Conrad Foundation on a pro-bono basis. The Conrad Foundation is working incredibly hard these days to get recognition for students across the country that are making a difference by stepping up and contributing solutions to some of our out planets biggest challenges, and I wanted to take a moment to recognize them and tell you a bit more about what they do.

One of the things that sets TriplePoint apart is the level of enthusiasm for games and technology that each member of our team brings to the table. We think that having genuine knowledge and interest in the markets we serve is incredibly important. Our enthusiasm doesn’t end with games and tech, though.

As it turns out, we have an unusually large contingent of self-styled beer connoisseurs on staff, and there’s no way we’re letting that go to waste! We’re looking at ways we can bring our PR, marketing and business expertise to craft breweries, helping grow their businesses and tap into the fast-growing market for good beer.

While we look at the best ways to do that, we’re using our collective appreciation for craft beer as an excuse to unwind at the end of the week and expand our beerological horizons – introducing TriplePoint’s Brewnanza!