Off-the-shelf, reskinned branded games can be tempting due to the seemingly much lower cost vs custom built solutions. A game is a game, right? Wrong. Here's why you really should steer well clear.

Quality is Generally Lower

This isn't always the case, but generally companies relying on bulk sales of off-the-shelf games, at a much lower rate and offer a much lower quality product. As with everything, you get what you pay for. Do you want to commission a developer who's having to speculatively churn out endless generic games for repurposing with no guarantee they will make any money, just to make sure they have everything covered in advance, or a developer who knows they're guaranteed fair compensation for their work and will carefully craft your game from the ground up, with your brand in mind?

When having to take the former approach, corners inevitably get cut and the bare minimum of work ends up getting done. So you can end up with not only a lower grade product, but a product that's missing much of the functionality you might expect.

Lack of Extra Features to Increase Engagement and Spread

Many off-the-shelf brandable games only include bare bones core functionality and lack many of the additional features you may want, need or expect. This stems from the fact that the game needs to be created in a generic, reusable form as well as needing to complete production as fast as possible.

Features like global scoreboards, social media sharing, Facebook games platform integration, or integration with your own custom backend system will likely be off the table without significant (and costly) custom modifications/additions. So by the time you've actually got everything you need added to a prebuilt branded game, the costs involved are nowhere near as low as you first thought.

You May Be on Your Own When It Comes to Support

When you buy a non-exclusive license of a pre-built, reskinnable game, you're usually going to get the final package ready for uploading and posting on your website. However, this isn't always as easy as it sounds. Especially now HTML5 is being used more and more to cover mobile compatibility. For instance branded HTML5 games usually include a number of files (code and assets) needed to make them work and an iframe is the usual way to embed into a web page. If you're not comfortable doing this, you really need to make sure a base level of support is included to help you get you up and running. Unfortunately, a cheap reskinned game license is unlikely to mean someone is there to guide you through every step of the process and troubleshoot any potential problems you may have.

Don't Settle for "That'll Do"

Your brand deserves better than settling for a ready made game that isn't exactly what you want, but is the closest fit you can find. You wouldn't do it in any other areas of your marketing, so why do it here? Would you pick an off-the-shelf TV or print advertisement and just put your logo on it? Imagine having the exact same advert as ten other companies, just with the logo changed.

Although there's no such thing as a truly unique game, there's a world of difference between say, having two car racing games, both built from the ground up and just swapping out some basic visual elements (or worse, just adding your logo) on one game to create another virtually identical one for a different brand.

When it comes to creating any form of content to help promote your business, making it as unique as possible is of the utmost importance and generic pre-made content should be avoided.

Each New Version Offers Diminishing Returns

Each time a new version of essentially the same game is released it becomes a harder sell, in terms of the promotion needed to get in front of players, in the first instance. Less players will be interested in playing and less websites, publications and individuals will be interested in linking to or sharing your branded game on social media. Players have already played it and websites that have already linked to or featured a previous version are unlikely to again.

We don't generally offer reskinned games for these reasons, but one project required a series of advergames to be produced for a client (the original, then 2 more reskinned versions for the same client, to promote other events).

The end result was that each subsequent version ended up doing less than half the daily play numbers of the previous version. It was on a severe downward spiral and I'd expect any additional versions of essentially the same game to follow the same path, to the point where they failed to move the needle at all.

In this case it really wasn't a problem, because they were all for the same client (in order to maximise their return on the initial investment), anything extra we could squeeze out of the two subsequent partially reskinned versions of the game was a bonus. Using a ready made game from the start, is another story. You don't know how many other brands have used it previously. You could be the 100th business to use a game, then you have a problem. Also, bear in mind these were fairly significant reskins, not just a logo swap. I'd expect the drop to be significantly greater when just the logo changes.

Custom branded games don't have this problem. You're guaranteed to be the first business in that line, so maximising the potential exposure for your brand.

Think Twice Before Going for the Cheaper Option

I hope this makes you think before using a cheaper, off-the-shelf game for your brand. It really is a false economy.

Now that we are well into the age of mobile and businesses, marketers and content creators are more often than not putting mobile first, one of the biggest dilemmas is how best to deploy branded content to make it accessible to mobile devices. This is especially true of branded games.

The two main choices for branded mobile games boil down to either using HTML5 or making it downloadable and installable as a standalone application via mobile app stores. Each have a great number of pros and cons and it's important to be aware of the implications of choosing one over the other, when planning a new branded game.

I'm going to break down the main considerations and the advantages and disadvantages that go along with them.

Technical Considerations

HTML5 has a whole raft of technical shortcomings, when compared to apps, some specific to mobile devices, some not.

Ultimately most of the problems come down to the fact that HTML5 is browser dependent (i.e. the web browser is responsible for interpreting the code into what you see and hear on screen) and the fact you're creating one version of you branded game to (hopefully) work everywhere.

It is getting better, but each browser has it's own interpretation of the HTML5 standard and some browsers even ignore the standards entirely and do their own thing. This can lead to different behaviour in different browsers and browser specific bugs and issues. It also means that an update to a specific web browser could actually have an adverse effect, or even break your game in future, without you doing anything.

Using an experienced HTML5 game developer will go some way to mitigating the risk of everything going pear shaped in future, but there are no guarantees. So you need to be aware, there's a chance you may need modifications in future, should this happen.

Although most mobile devices and tablets currently in use support the HTML5 features needed to run most mobile web games, there are still some device specific issues that may or may not be important to you. Some notable examples are:

Sound on iOS devices can't start until after the first touch event

In practice, this means that your game will start silent on iPhones and iPads, with no background music or sound effects playing until the first time the user touches the screen (usually clicking a "play game" button on the main menu screen).

Running in true full screen mode is problematic

Between browser address bars and phone status bars you're usually going to lose at least a small portion of the screen, unlike with an app, where it's easy to take advantage of the full screen area. This can be especially problematic on small smartphone screens.

There is a "dead area" at the top and bottom of the screen

It's not advisable to put any interactive elements in these areas. Touching here can cause browser navigation and address bars to reappear over content on some mobile devices. This is most problematic on iOS devices and further reduces the actual usable screen area, although a good experienced designer can usually work around this.

It's web based

This means to play, you need a live internet connection (unlike an app, where once it's installed you can usually play without access to the internet). In practice, this means that players on devices such as tablets, that are Wi-Fi only, or even players who've gone over their mobile data limits will lose access on the go.

Quality of the End Product/User Experience

This is where apps really do shine over HTML5 for branded mobile games.

Because apps are effectively a stand-alone software product and don't exist within the confines of a web browser, they get around many of the technical limitations of web based games.

You get an end product that's more akin to a "real" computer game, rather than just a piece of web based content. Better multimedia and sound support allow for a slicker experience. Plus, being able to go truly full screen (especially on smartphones) and being able to position interactive elements over the full area of the screen is hugely beneficial.

I should add, this doesn't mean it's not possible to create great branded mobile games with HTML5, on the contrary. But the fact is HTML5 imposes more restrictions on the design process and will almost always lead to a technically inferior end product to the app equivalent.

Timescale

This is a big one and the number one reason to choose HTML5 over an app.

More often than not, when a client comes to us with a branded mobile game project, the timescale is measured in weeks, not months. Until more businesses start planning much further ahead, the number of projects where time allows a mobile app to be a viable option are few and far between.

As long as a cross platform solution such as Adobe AIR is used, actual production time for an app shouldn't be significantly greater than a web based game. However, the problem comes with actual deployment. For small scale projects, the necessary submission/review process to get published on app stores might add as much time to the project as was spent on production.

Which leads us nicely into...

Ease of Deployment

HTML5 makes it incredibly easy to actually publish your branded game and make it available via your website. It's simply a case of uploading the files to your server (or adding a bit of embed code, if it's hosted elsewhere). So, once production is finished you're usually looking at hours or days, not weeks or months to go live on your website.

Not so with apps. If you want to publish your branded mobile game in your business name, first of all you'll need to sign up with the appropriate app stores. This can take some time and should be done well in advance of project completion. Then there's the app store submission and review process, which each mobile app needs to go through before being able to go live on the appropriate app store. We usually recommend allowing an additional month to any branded app game project timeframe. This allows plenty of time to get through the review process and make any changes, should issues arise.

Which us brings us to...

Control of the Content

Ultimately, one of the big trade-offs with branded mobile app games is the fact that you're relinquishing a degree of control over what the finished product is allowed to be and the speed at which you can make the content available and potentially update it afterwards.

The app stores and their review processes put up a barrier between you and your audience. Although app store guidelines rarely limit what your content can be, there is always the possibility of having to make modifications to fit within these guidelines to get your branded app game approved. You also lose control of timings to a degree, with often lengthy review procedures being a requirement in order to make your game available for download. Should updates be required in future, the review process needs to be repeated each and every time.

This is the exact opposite of HTML5, where you retain full control of your content. The choices about what it will be, where and when it's made available are completely yours. As well as being quick to upload and make your branded mobile game live, it's also just as quick and easy to push out updates in future, should they be required.

Ease of Access

When it comes to actually being able to almost immediately get access and play your branded game, HTML5 is the clear winner. Simply enter the web address into the browser, or click a link and you're ready to play. This immediacy makes it easier to try your game, so is a big bonus when it comes to branded games.

With apps there is an extra degree of persuasion to get people to go to the app store, download and install a mobile game in the first place. Plus, requiring that they download and install on their device may dissuade some people.

However, you could argue that the install process with an app game brings it's own benefits in terms of player retention. Once completed you have a nice clickable icon on their home screen, reminding them to go back and play again.

Potential Exposure

HTML5 is the clear winner here. The fact that it's possible to deploy one version of a branded game that's not only available on most modern mobile devices, but also on desktop computers with a modern browser installed, means you can maximise your potential reach.

A mobile app game usually limits you to not only just mobile devices, but the specific types of devices that correspond with the app stores you've submitted to. Obviously the iOS and Google Play app stores will cover a big majority of mobile devices, but unless you target the minority app stores (Amazon Kindle, Windows Phone, etc.), then those devices will be off limits.

Hosting

Because apps are generally downloaded from appropriate app stores and use third party services for additional features like scoreboards, there isn't usually a significant hosting requirement.

Web based branded games however need to be delivered by a web server (usually via your own website). So if you're planning to go down the HTML5 route, it's necessary to consider the web hosting requirement in relation to the expected traffic. For instance:

A simple branded HTML5 game might be 2-3MB in size. If you think you can realistically expect to drive 500 players per day, that's roughly 15,000 plays per month. So the traffic volume attached to that would be around 45GB per month.

Obviously, the more complex the game and the more players you get, the more traffic volume generated (that needs to be accounted for on the hosting side of things). Although not a huge issue for most businesses with a dedicated server, it's definitely worth being aware of the bandwidth implications for delivery to large numbers of players.

So Which is Best?

There is no right or wrong answer to this and it totally depends on the specifics of the project. But generally, if you need a fast turnaround and you can live with the technical limitations of the platform, HTML5 is usually the way to go. If having the best quality end product is a priority, you're planning your project well ahead of time and playing on desktop computers is less of a concern, then apps are usually the best choice for a branded mobile game.

Video games are still often seen as a frivolous pastime and the domain of kids. But did you realise they can and are being used for serious applications by businesses all over the world? Helping them not only accomplish a multitude of goals, but accomplish them more effectively. So the big question is, are you using games in your business and if not, why not?

Games can be used to make training fun, help you engage with customers and clients (past, present and future), increase productivity and more. With options of deploying online, on mobile devices, via PC hardware and more. I've written this article to highlight and give you a flavour of the top 5 ways your business can start using games.

1) Marketing, Advertising & PR

In the offline world, traditional advertising methods are still the go-to way to get the word out about your company. Online, Pay-Per-Click advertising is still the number one method of generating highly targeted traffic. But, what happens after people find you? How do you go about keeping visitors engaged on your business website, as well as giving them a reason to return.

Content marketing is really gaining more traction than ever in the online world. It essential serves two main purposes, providing "sticky" content to keep visitors engaged on your website and helping promote your website and business by getting links and social shares that ultimately drive traffic.

Getting natural links and social shares is more important than ever to any company looking to get more exposure online. When most businesses think about a premium piece of content to help their SEO and PR, they think video. But what many don't realise is there's a much more engaging alternative available to businesses for a comparable production cost.

The problem with video is it's only ever a passive medium, your audience doesn't really participate. This can make scope for re-engagement limited - once they've seen a video, it's unlikely to offer anything new on repeat views. Then there's the problem of so many businesses using video now that it's become increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd.

Despite the fact they've been around for at least a decade and their use is growing, branded games used for marketing are still only being used by a minute percentage of companies. Unlike video, they're interactive, so the viewer directly participates. They also offer an incentive to go back for repeat plays (beat that high score, complete that level, etc.), so overcome most of the drawbacks of corporate videos.

2) Business Promotions

When most people think business promotions, seasonal or otherwise, they think traditional physical promotional items and corporate gifts. Printed T-shirts, pens, mugs, corporate greetings cards and the like. Although they serve their purpose, are these really helping your business stand out in a crowded marketplace?

When sent out to customers and clients past, present and (hopefully) future, an interactive promotional game can really help your company stand out and add the wow factor to your business promotions.

3) Employee Training

Whether it's learning basic business practices or complex internal systems in the workplace, employee training isn't usually the most exciting of things. Serious games and simulations provide a unique way to break through that and make corporate training fun, providing a truly engaging medium to get the information across and help it sink in.

4) Staff Rewards to Boost Morale in the Workplace

It's been proven time and time again, a happy staff is a productive staff. If you want to go the extra mile in injecting a bit of fun into the workplace, creating a branded game for employees to play can be a great reward around Christmas time, any other significant occasion, or just for no reason at all.

It can live on your company intranet (behind an employee login), up on the web (to play outside the workplace), or even make a great, fun addition to your break area.

5) Exhibitions and Live Events

If you're the kind of business that exhibits at a lot of trade shows or use live events and experiential marketing to promote your products and services, you've probably tried to come up with ideas of how to stand out and draw a crowd.

A game on your exhibition stand could very well be the solution - providing an enjoyable, free experience and encouraging competition over the course of the event with a high score board. Plus, you can use it at multiple events to maximise the benefit for your business and make sure you get your money's worth.

We get asked a lot by clients if we can incorporate a competition into a branded online game. This isn't a problem in itself and obviously many clients want to use a competition as a way of increasing interest. What is a problem however is running competitions where prizes are given based on the highest scores (or other game outcomes) and this is usually what they want to do. It doesn't help that clearly inexperienced developers are doing just that for their clients, so other people assume it's ok.

Only yesterday I discovered another Facebook game that included a competition based on players' scores. And as expected the scoreboard was full of scores that were impossible to attain in normal gameplay. This is the fundamental problem with doing this, players can cheat to win prizes and any experienced developer, quite frankly, should have known better.

I'm not going to go into too much of the technical side but I am going to explain the two main methods players use to cheat in order to win prizes.

It's unfortunately unavoidable, although there are some limited precautions we can take to help prevent cheating, if players are determined enough they will get around them. And it goes without saying that the more worthwhile you make it for them (the bigger and better the prizes they can win), the more likely you are to attract some serious hacking attempts. For this reason we always strongly recommend to our clients not to base in-game competitions on high scores.

Scoreboard Hacking

This is one of the most common method used to cheat, in order to win competition prizes. Global scoreboards have to be implemented by using a remote server-side script to send the score data to a data file or database.

If the player knows where this server side script resides (and it's fairly easy to find out by checking the calls from the browser) they can fake the act of sending a new high score. So they can effectively add whatever score they want to the scoreboard, without having to even play at all.

Another method involves changing the score as it's stored in memory, during runtime. There are freely available programs written specifically to do this. These types of hacks are generally how you end up with scoreboards full of impossibly high scores into tens or hundreds of millions.

There are limited methods to combat this. In the case of hacking the script call, verifying scores as they're submitted and discarding impossibly high ones is one solution. This won't stop people finding the limits of that range though and filling up the scoreboard with equal, highest possible scores in a attempt to win.

It's also possible to use something called a cryptographic hash to send the data. This adds a basic level of security to the data you send, which means in order to cheat you'd need to crack the code first.

To help combat memory hacks, it's also possible to apply some encryption to the score data in memory. These types of methods can make it much more difficult, but not impossible to hack and as I said before, make it worth their while and they will hack it.

It's also worth mentioning that this isn't something that's technology specific whether your online game is Flash, HTML5 or something else, the risk of cheating to win competition prizes applies to all web based technologies. However, HTML5 is potentially the easiest to hack because the code is viewable by anyone with a web browser.

Cheating on Timed Games by Altering Frame Rate

This will involve a bit of techy explanation, so I'll try to keep it as simple as possible.

Game timers can be implemented in one of two ways:

Tie It Into the Main Game Loop

This has the disadvantage of only having accuracy based on the frame rate. A game running at 30 frames per second (which is the frame rate we usually use) will be able to count the timer in steps of 1/30th second. This is usually fine (and preferable) for games where the timer just counts down a limited gameplay time, such as in a timed puzzle. Although this can cause it's own problems (which I won't go into here), the timer is not independent of frame rate. If the game slows down or speeds up, the timer slows down and speeds up with it.

Tie It Into the Computer Clock

This has the advantage of much greater accuracy, allowing timers accurate to thousandths of a second. If the player's score is directly tied to the timer, e.g. a racing game where the quickest time is the highest score, this is usually essential. Without this sort of accuracy, there's just not enough to separate the scores of players and you'd end up with too many players getting the exact same time. The problem with this though is the timer is independent of the frame rate, so regardless of whether the game runs at 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second the timer will run in the same "real" time.

This opens the opportunity to cheat to win prizes, if your competition is based on high scores. Programs are freely available that enable the player to change the frame rate of a game as they see fit. So, if for instance you have a timed race game, the player could potentially double the frame rate, which would make the race happen twice as fast, but the timer would still run the same as it would at the normal frame rate. This could allow the player to halve their time and get a much better score and was likely the exact method used to cheat on the Facebook competition I mentioned earlier.

Again verifying the times and throwing out impossibly fast ones before sending to the scoreboard is a partial solution, but not a particularly great one and certainly won't prevent cheating altogether. Another possible solution (which I won't go into too much) is using something called delta time in the main loop. This is used in lots of commercial games to get around variable frame rates (usually caused by hardware performance, or lack of it) but has a number of disadvantages for small scale retro/2D games.

The Solution

Obviously none of these hacking issues are too much of a problem if there aren't competition prizes at stake. With no incentive to "hack" to win a competition, players are far less likely to try and even if they do, there's no harm done. Plus, any good developer should be aware of these issues (although in practice it seems very few are) and take appropriate, limited security steps to make it harder to cheat, as we always do.

The problem comes when prizes are at stake. But this doesn't mean you have to ditch the idea of including a competition in your game altogether, there's a simple solution. Don't tie the awarding of prizes to scores achieved, or other game outcomes. Instead, run a free entry prize draw competition.

This gives you complete control over the awarding of competition prizes and removes the incentive to cheat, because the reward is only a chance to win a prize, not a guarantee they'll win. You can also help combat obvious cheating through your terms and conditions, enabling you to put a limit on number of entries per person and exclude entirely players who might hack to gain many entries.

Overall, it's a much safer solution and allows you to incorporate a competition in your game, without risking the whole thing being rendered null and void by casual hackers.

I know some would say we're just conditioned to expect a mouse and keyboard combo, or a gamepad when playing games and it just requires thinking outside the box. But there's no doubt about it, a lack of any sort of meaningful input device on mobile devices is a huge barrier in mobile game design. We're only offered a very basic, imprecise input device. This basically boils mobile game controls down to prodding or swiping with a finger or tilting the device, making it difficult to implement many of the traditional genres we know and love.

Of course it is a very different market than for web based, or traditional PC and console games, so I suppose it comes with the territory. Dumbed down, "one-button" and grid based puzzle games, with little depth, are what the devices thrive on. But I'd argue that the market is due to the limitations of the device, not the limitations of the device are due to the market. If, for instance, you want to implement a retro action game, platform game or anything at all that involves shooting (to name but a few) you're really out of luck.

The main problems with designing mobile game controls are:

Visibility

Being forced to put your hand/finger right over what you're looking at and/or tilting the device obscures our view of what's going on. This is all without taking into account the greasy finger smears that can end up partially obscuring the screen.

Pointer Accuracy

Touch screens obviously lend themselves towards mimicking other pointer devices such as mice, trackballs and graphics tablets. The problem is they are much less accurate than all of the traditional pointer devices. This means hit areas such as buttons need to be bigger and people with large hands and fingers often struggle.

This and the visibility issue are huge inherent problems with touch screens and a big part of the reason why touch screens are also a bad idea on desktop and laptop PCs.

Lack of Multiple, Physical Buttons

Without multiple, physical buttons your control options are seriously limited. Say you're faced with having to design a game to coincide with the release of an action film. Then you're struggling. Prodding a screen with a greasy finger, whilst watching a constantly moving character simply jump through hoops just isn't going to do it.

Current Solutions

These devices were never made for games. Their crude, simplistic input devices were designed for a totally different purpose.

If you need to implement multiple distinct interactions required by most retro game genres (such as movement, jumping, attacking/shooting) without a keyboard or controller you're left with having to use a virtual, on screen controller. Again, this can obscure the on-screen action (particularly on small smartphone screens) and provides none of the feel or physical feedback of a physical input device.

The other alternative is to try and force a basic point and click based control system into every game. This leaves you in a similar position to only having a mouse for PC games (but with much less pinpoint accuracy). It's ok for certain genres, but try using just a mouse to control a retro 2D platform game. This is why these sorts of games tend to turn into overly basic single action, one-button games, with most other actions happening automatically.

Physical Controller Add-Ons

Physical gamepad controllers for smartphones have started to emerge, usually clipping onto and extending the phone. This is a step in the right direction, but I worry about the practicalities of having to carry around a physical add-on that is at least as big as the smartphone itself. These are meant to be mobile devices and with smartphones getting bigger and bigger anyway, is anyone really going to be bothered to carry another bulky item around with them? There's also the price issue. These controllers can often be an expensive addition to an already extremely expensive device.

A Solution is Required

As it stands now, gaming on smartphones and tablets is great for the Nintendo DS casual crowd. Although these are often people that wouldn't normally play computer games. Until the control issues on mobile devices are sorted out it's going to be extremely difficult to lure gamers away from consoles, PCs and even dedicated handheld gaming devices. Anything other than simple timewaster games are difficult to pull off on mobile devices and at best involve some serious compromises, in terms of controls at least.