The benefits of Super Rewards to Make Money For Your Games…

Adam talks about the benefits of Super Rewards to make lots of money for your game

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/super-rewards-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Adam: I am Adam Caplan, and I am the President of Super Rewards.

Interviewer: What’s Super Rewards about?

Adam: Super Rewards is a virtual crediting monetization platform used by game developers in the social media space, MMOs, virtual worlds, et cetera.

Interviewer: Do you have to be an application on Facebook?

Adam: Absolutely not. You can be a standalone site of any kind. So we are working with about 800 applications across the social media space today but also 20 to 30 standalone sites, anything from play span marketplace to Crunchyrole to Wild West Online to Our World, a lot of standalone sites.

Interviewer: What services do you exactly offer? Is it just people come and fill out surveys or what?

Adam: We provide a way for developers to monetize the users either directly with users paying for virtual currency. They can pay through any one of a couple of hundred different methods around the world from credit cards to PayPal to charging it to their mobile phone, gift cards, put a check in the mail, cash in the mail, you name it, any way of getting a dollar or two to get you to pay for something directly, we provide it.

We also provide a way for consumers to earn virtual currency for free by completing advertising offers. So, fill out a survey; sign up for some product like Netflix or a mobile ring tone service or a newspaper subscription; whatever that service is that provides an inflow of revenue to the developer.

And the developer rewards the user with virtual currency to use either within the game, to play the game, for a subscription, download whatever that virtual currency is used for we just provide a way to fund that virtual currency.

Interviewer: So, most developers who do this in their game, they do need to have virtual currency in the game for the store.

Adam: That’s the primary way we use today. It doesn’t have to be that. We could just show our CPA offers attached to some product. For example, if you have a game, it’s a $10 price point and you want it to show only offers that would pay up $10, we could do that. The beautiful thing about virtual currency is it provides flexibility, so if one offer might pay up $3.50 and another might pay up $6.50, you could combine the two to get the $10 price point.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the good design practices that game developers and designers can use to either optimize their virtual economy or generate more revenue in a way that’s sustainable?

Adam: Yeah, so I guess there are a whole variety of different tricks and tips that we work with our developers on. We have a game advisory team as part of Super Rewards whose sole job is to work with our partners on optimizing their sites.

The things they do are around pricing virtual items or how to optimize the flow of users to a page. Things like tips for your own game; how to make a story line more consistent; how do you have consistent characters? What sort of virtual items should you be charging for or implementing? We have a team dedicated to that.

But I think if you look across our platform today by far and away the most lucrative area is still the role playing game category where there are people very vested in their character development. They can come play for awhile, come back to it over time and follow their character through a story line. We see those types of games monetizing, you know, many, many times some of the other characters.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the potential revenue that indie developers can make using your program or system?

Adam: Well, we have several developers we work with just in the social media space. They are individual developers, 25-year-old guys that are earning a million dollars a month through Super Rewards.

Interviewer: Oh really, awesome.

Adam: So, if you have a hit game that consumers are passionate about playing with and are willing to incorporate virtual currency into a way to monetize the user again and again and again who are passionate about playing your game. Where we might have three or four games making individual developers a million dollars a month, we have hundreds of developers making $10,000 plus a month.

Interviewer: Sure.

Adam: And so, this is a way to really, really take something you’re passionate about and make that available to folks out there and make a great living from it

Interviewer: Now, the people who are making a million a month, I mean, does that go down over time, or how do you guys actually keep that consistent or is it just part of the life cycle?

Adam: It’s two things. It’s the developer keeping the content fresh and consistent.

Interviewer: So, that’s by adding new content every week or something else like that.

Adam: Yeah, too, one of the really great things we’ve seen is limited item virtual goods where someone comes out with a special sword or a special engine for a car. It’s only available, 100 of them available and it’s available for 24 hours. People just take that stuff up like crazy. Adding in that fresh content that fits in with the story line is really, really powerful.

The other thing we do on our end is we’re always refreshing our offers. Every day we add 100 new offers to the platform, and 100 offers that are no longer monetizing drop off. It’s always, how do we keep fresh advertising offers in front of the consumers so they’re always coming back and saying, how can I get my free points? Well, today I’m going to sign up for Netflix. Tomorrow I’m want to download a ring tone to my file. It’s always changing everyday.

Interviewer: So, when you talk about these limited item things, are there any other things that also produce good results for indie game developers?

Adam: Yeah, some of the interesting things we are seeing now are around meta games on top of standard flash games. For example, we are doing a lot of work on our end to come out with a product soon that will help our development partners at these meta games. I think it’s around trophy cabinets and adding collectible trading cards.

It might fall outside the normal flash game, but there’s an extra element of fun and participation, and it’s a way to monetize with virtual currencies where you might have a game that doesn’t typically have a virtual currency in it.

Interviewer: How would trading cards actually make money because I know a lot of indie developers who do flash games.

Adam: So, let’s say that by finishing a particular flash game or getting a certain score, you are rewarded a particular trading card. With that trading card it became part of a collectible set and your aim was to continue building this collectible set, it adds this extra element of continuous game play around the flash game.

Interviewer: And so, the player is trying to collect that whole set. You would get that whole set by playing all the different flash games and attaining certain scores then?

Adam: Maybe, that’s right. Maybe, playing a different selection of games. Maybe, it’s playing the same game and achieving certain things, but it’s all about how do you engage the user to keep coming back and have some pay credits. You use credits to collect these tradable items that might have an impact on, maybe, a score multiplier or some other element of the flash game play.

Interviewer: Developers if they have a game, I mean, how many active users or daily active users do they need to actually make a decent amount of money? So to make, say, 10 thousand a month or whatever which would give an indie developer freedom or whatever to quit their job, how many daily actives do they need for that?

Adam: We definitely on our platform say on average earnings of, maybe, a dollar per active user a month, so if you’ve got 10,000 active users across a month and they are coming back on a regular basis, you can make that sort of money.

Some games, the variation is very wide. You might have games that are making 10 cents, but you might have games that are making $20.

Interviewer: Per active user?

Adam: It’s an incredible range. If you look at the leaders in the space that are doing well in the social media space, you can pick up a lot of tips from their applications of games that demonstrate how viral these things can be and what sorts of things that users are passionate about doing.

Interviewer: If people want to find out more about this and want to get started, what do they do?

Adam: Come to srpoints.com.

Interviewer: S-r-points.com.

Adam: It’s s for super and r for rewards, points.com. It’s a very simple signup process with us. Let us know what your currency is called. What side it sits on, whether it’s a social networking side or a standalone side? What you want your credits to be worth? And then it spits out some I-Frame code. You can put that in your application or you can take an XML feed of our offers and custom build the offers into your flash application. So, we’re very flexible.

Interviewer: People can integrate this into their flash game, too.

Adam: Absolutely. We think that’s a very big market, and we’re just beginning to understand it. We’re excited to be part of it. We encourage all indie developers to get out there because we certainly have a lot of folks making themselves very wealthy people through us, and we think it’s a great industry to be part of.

Interviewer: You have other competitors. What do you guys offer versus your competitors?

Adam: There’s a couple of things, I think. The flexibility of our offering; there isn’t anybody else that is having this XML thing at the moment so it puts into the hands of the developer exactly how they want this to be displayed. The breadth of advertising offerings, we have offerings in 30 countries around the world. We have 4 to 5,000 different offers in our platform today which is more than anybody else.

So, particularly if you have an international component to your user base, we monetize far more effectively than anybody else internationally because we just have a bigger breadth of offers.

Finally, we really think of ourselves as partners to you guys. There’s a team of folks whose job is not about how do we make our advertising platform more effective, it’s about what advice can we give our partners on ways that integrate the things they can do on their end around adding in limited virtual items, of pricing things differently. Getting people to the offer page more effectively. Talk about a consulting service which we don’t charge for but how can we make you guys more effective.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.