It’s no secret that mobile gaming is big.
Recent reports say mobile gaming is a $96 billion business, and it’s forecasted to grow to $272 billion by 2030.
One big challenge for mobile gaming companies today is getting players talking about the game online, where it has the potential to spread quickly, even go viral, thanks to social media.
Companies use platforms like TikTok, Discord, Reddit and more to encourage gamers to share engaging content about their gameplay achievements. But they need a tool to fuel social sharing.
In mobile gaming, the challenge is bigger than console or PC gaming. While console and PC games tend to be focused on longer, story-driven gameplay, mobile games are more casual, simpler. That often means there’s less content to share.
Plus, when it comes to data, most mobile gaming companies have only the most basic info on their players, such as their current score or level.
How Mobile Gaming Companies Can Win Big With Content
Here at Idomoo, we have a solution. I like to think of them as personal brag badges, but they’re essentially Personalized GIFs with a gaming twist.
They’re personalized because they’re unique for every player. And this kind of personalized content is proven to engage gamers, sparking social shares, sales and even prompting lapsed players to return to the game.
Results from Personalization in Gaming
-
10x
higher engagement
-
17x
player reactivation
-
5x
uplift in social sharing
-
68%
increase
in sales
What Are Personal Brag Badges?
Personal brag badges are small animated images with personal information about the current game and player. These GIFs are easy to share on mobile and social media, driving players to brag about (or playfully lament) their performance in the game — typically, a high score.
The best way to show exactly how this works is with an example, so I’d like to show you the steps we took to make this vision a reality.
Mobile Gameplay Badge Example
For this demo, we created a small mobile game called “Space Strike.”
Space Strike is a simple game where you fly around and shoot enemy ships. Each ship you destroy gives the player 10 points. When your ship gets destroyed, your total points become your final score.
For this game, we decided to use Unity (a popular game-building platform) for the speed of development, but this solution works with any platform.
Step 2: Making the “Brag Badges”
We created a 5-second animation showing the player’s ship, name, final score and a short message at the end that lets the player brag on how well they did. Isn’t that what social media is for?
Creating this template (storyboard) using the Idomoo toolset was simple and quick. You don’t need development know-how. We’re talking about drag-and-drop simplicity. (That’s part of the reason our platform is self-serve.)
After the template was uploaded to the Idomoo platform, it was ready to go into production.
Step 3: Integration
Using Unity was fairly simple. Here’s what happened to create this brag badge.
- Detect when the game ended.
- Send an API call after the game ends to the Idomoo API to generate the animated GIF with the relevant data points.
- Receive the animated GIF link back from the Idomoo platform to the Unity engine, allowing the player to share the GIF using the phone’s native sharing functionality.
Sharing Your Badge
The “brag badges” can be sent via WhatsApp, Discord or uploaded to a variety of social networks, transforming simple bland data into rich content that’s uniquely shareable. This content can increase viral sharing between players and around the web, raising awareness about the game to increase engagement and downloads.
The Case for GIFs
Most of our gaming campaigns involve cinematic and exciting Personalized Videos. Watch the latest personalized recap video from Ubisoft (split-screen version below), and you’ll see what we mean.
But sometimes a GIF is the right choice. It’s a lighter use case — you won’t be recapping an entire year of gameplay like Ubisoft did above, but you can easily highlight a high score as we did with our example or celebrate a gaming anniversary.
GIFs pack some of the visual punch of video since they’re animated and engaging, but they don’t require as much complexity to create. They’re ideal if you want to embed video in email because you can add the animated GIF where you couldn’t add a video.
Or it can be part of a larger campaign. For video email marketing, a GIF can be a thumbnail that users can click to see a longer video or to reach a video landing page. For social media marketing, it could be one of many content options you provide players — you can personalize infographics, videos, GIFs and more.
The Secret of Scale
The important part here is scale. Even with a simple GIF, you don’t want an animator manually adding hundreds or thousands of player names to the file. With our Next Generation Video Platform, you can create millions of GIFs (or videos) personalized for every individual.
Have a global audience of millions? No problem. We’ve done this for EA, Epic Games, Ubisoft and many more. It’s even easy to handle multiple languages, add emojis, whatever you want. The world is yours.
To see inside some of the world’s best personalized gaming campaigns, check out our free ebook. We’ll show you how the pros use personalized content to keep players coming back and telling their friends all about it.
