I havn't seen this yet, and I'm sure it could be abused... but has anyone put a little extra effort into their demos to have a sort of "E-mail this game to your friends!" Sort of like how many websites have.. though of course it would only email your website to the 'friend'. With just a simple outgoing email server in the demo to allow the user to type an email into a input box then press send to send a message!

A friend of yours has sent you this to tell you to check it out!

Or something more reasonable :D

What is the useability of this? Or is it not worth the extra code?:confused:



/pkeod

Smells like spam to me.

How is it spam? It's a friend telling another friend about the game without having to leave the game.

I've thought about doing this, but there are a bunch of potential headaches, like people using it to annoy their friends or their enemies, and other such things that I decided not to do it this time around.

Well, for a couple reasons.
First, you friend didn't ask for it, so it is by definition unsolicited.
Second, I get a lot of spam along the lines of "Hey, Fred wanted you to check this out" and it's an ad for Paris Hilton videos.
Third, many of the email viruses (virii?) spread by raiding the poor victim's contact list and sending a "message from a friend".

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it smells fishy. Well, spammy. If I got a "message from a friend" about a game, I would just delete it. Just my opinion, of course. :)

I plan to do this using a "mailto" URL - which would use the users mail account to send the mail. I'm not sure on how many computers this would work though.

I think that's good idea (if you quarantee that the friend's email address is not going to be spammed later!)

if you can provide a small pic / e-card / anything related to your game that's verry fine. also - if you put there a suggestion "link to me" and put a few banners and give ready html-code (on how to use that banner) it can be good service.

make it friendly & honest service - and it will be good.

A valid point that people may delete it under suspicion of spam/virus. But it *isn't* actually spam, just like sending a regular email message to your friend isn't spam (even though it's usually unsolicited).

Just because mail is unsolicited does not mean it's spam. I get mail all the time from my father-in-law that I didn't ask for.

Originally posted by pkeod
I havn't seen this yet, and I'm sure it could be abused... but has anyone put a little extra effort into their demos to have a sort of "E-mail this game to your friends!"
A friend of yours has sent you this to tell you to check it out!

Or something more reasonable :D

What is the useability of this? Or is it not worth the extra code?:confused:



/pkeod

I used to have in-game links for recommend that would pop up their email with a similar message. Looking at it from a users point of view: the problem is they are not sure whats going on when they click that in-game link, ie is this doing something to their system?

So, what I do now is have an html webpage pop up splash after the game is exited. There is a recommend link, a feedback link, a picture of me for reassurance and a small amount of info about my other games. This is an offline webpage, so the user is not likely to have any worries about clicking an email link.

Hpe this helps.

Alfie

a picture of me for reassurance


:)

Are you smiling winningly and giving a big thumbs up?

LOL

Only a small smile :)

A couple of thumbs up would probably be a bit cheesy, but you never know!

Alfie

For some of the reasons stated above, I'm not sure attempting to force viral marketing through email works as well as it used to.

Now, what *would* be handy would be to try to design ways to start a LiveJournal meme. :) Most of them revolve around silly quizzes, but - what if you had a web game, and when the game ends, it gives the player a generated image showing their score/rank and the HTML code for them to post it in their journal/website with a link back to the game?

"I'm a SUPER GURU at Giant Golf Nightmare - _How about you_?"

Obviously there's a bandwidth hit involved since you have to host all the images for the people to link back to, but it might net you traffic. Of course, all that traffic would be driving right to the free game, so it'd better be a good sales-pusher.

(And, um, if this makes you rich, link to my site? :) )

I remember that in the early days of ICQ, mirabilis used the same method. thats how i got to hear about ICQ and first downloaded it.

Doesn't Zen Puzzle Garden do this? It would be good to get feedback from Lexaloffle.

Well! I was just about to post..

I have 'tell a friend' links at the end of both Zen and Neko. They redirect the player to a web page which does the work. I did this because it was easier to implement but also I think I would feel more comfortable about using a standard web form to mail someone (I don't know why).

The page doesn't get used much. Maybe about once for every 100 downloads. But I still think it is definately worthwhile. The referral can probably get you a higher than average quality visitor and also the mere suggestion of telling a friend at the end of the game might motivate someone to do so even if they don't use the web page. I see more indication of referral activity occuring via other channels - e.g. my web logs show referrals from online mail services and also search phases such as 'Japanese Zen Garden Game'.

There is the possibility of abuse, but I haven't had any complaints yet. Just be sure to make it clear where the email came from and why they are receiving it. Also, make it clear that you need email addresses and not just full names. I had a surprising number of bounced mails from people sending their message to 'Martha FinkleStein'. (:

-J

We have tell a friend buttons in all our titles. They do generate sales. I don't think it's anything like spam.

I think the trick here is to make sure the email explicitly names who recommended it (including their email address). Make it clear that even though you are doing the mechanics of it, the email was sent by their friend.

If you do that, it ain't spam. And it won't smell like spam to an end user. Well, any but the most paranoid delusional sorts, but they don't have many friends anyway.

I thought about adding an input area for your name and your email as well... but I think that would be abused tooo easily, and end the end we would get blamed for this... Of course you could have a few other ways of Identification... IP addresses, or even the login name for the computer user? Maybe all of them? Have a sort of... This email was sent from 'name' with login name 'name' and ip address '00.000.*** At the end of the email... Many, many options for this.

I like the livejournal Idea :D I think the best way to do this would probably use small 20*20 sprits to represent your type (Like say you had a submarine game and next to your score you had a badge - or if you did a rpg you would have a sprit of your monsters (or items, or nps’s)... with of course the higher the score the stronger the Icon character... Or if you did an adventure game you could even do it so that what ever ending you received would have a different screen shot of sorts.) and then make a few different quiz's on something like quizilla for even more sustenance for the quiz type. (even if you don't even have to play the game to take the quiz) Of course... I don't see that many sales from this directly (though if you had a cute game and you started people from neopets on it; chances are with quizzes it would spread like wildfire) these sorts of things are like tee shirt or mugs :D No meant to get that much money to you the developer, but more or less mainly to spread the word.