In the leadup to this week’s launch of Dante’s Inferno for XBox 360, Playstation 3 and the upcoming launch of the PSP version, EA partnered with Lolapps to successfully launch the Dante’s Inferno Facebook game. Looking at the numbers, the game has accumulated 4 million Monthly Active Users since its launch, and had had 1 million users in the week first week of the release of the Facebook Application. Lolapps was most famous for their Band of Heroes game, a Mafia Wars-style RPG with over 1,000,000 MAUs and a strong story component, but this has been eclipsed by the success of Dante’s Inferno, and represents a step forward for the company. We’ve been able to get some key statistics about the game from Lolapps, and share them here.
First of all, 62% of people who played the Dante Inferno’s game on Facebook indicated that they intend to purchase the Dante’s console game. This adds up to about 2.5 million users if we count the 4 million MAUs. We’ll see if this number holds up in sales, but underscores the effectiveness of application and game based advertising. This compares with only 25% of TV ad viewers who even recalled a Dante’s Inferno television advertisement, and only half of that group indicating they had purchase intent for the game (source: Akoo).
Another striking fact was the direct conversions to sales. Of the half a percent of daily active users who clicked over to EAStore.com, an extremely high 2% converted into direct purchases of the Dante’s Inferno console game.
Here are some other interesting facts:
- 64% of players surveyed mentioned that they usually play for more than an hour
- 52% of players surveyed mentioned that they learnt of the EA Dante’s Inferno game from the Facebook game
- The majority of players installed the game because a friend invited them
We can see that social media integration is a big part of EA’s strategy, as the Facebook fan page is promoted all across the official Dante’s Inferno page. This fits well with their recent announcement at their latest financial meeting that there will be an “online component to every game” and that they would be bringing several titles to Facebook. The numbers on this are staggering, and while many companies attempt to create applications to support advertising launches, this kind of success is rare and nice to see. The game itself boasts gorgeous art, a similar game engine to Band of Heroes, and definitely has a solid community. A good question is whether people will continue to play as the hype around the game dies down, but if Band of Heroes is any example, they will.
While I do believe a Facebook game can be used successfully to promote a console title, there is some Second Life-worthy numerical fudging going on here.
The number of users the game acquired at launch reflects the amount of marketing thrown at it, nothing more. Your own data on this site suggests that the vast majority of users they acquired left immediately, which you can see by the extremely low DAU/MAU ratio (~3% over the past month, vs ~26% for Mafia Wars).
It’s also misleading to suggest that this is actually good conversion data. 0.5% of, say, 200k DAUs is 1,000 users, of whom 2% converted into purchases. In other words, this app that had millions users thrown at it resulted in roughly twenty purchases.
I think this kind of stuff can work, but cookie cutter implementations like this are not the way forward.
This is interesting, but at the same time I’ve seen a lot of marketing campaigns fall on their face when launching big products. EA has tried this in the past themselves with less explosive results.
While there is a drop off, and the conversion rate is still high for full price console game upsells from a Facebook application.
I agree that more innovation could be more effective, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call this cookie cutter. There was definitely a lot of time taken to flesh out the game system, tasks, and artwork, and as being someone that has worked on the game development side before, I think you may not be giving the 4 million MAU number the respect it deserves. For every Dante’s Inferno there are 100 failures of a similar nature.