Urban Airship, the US company which provides mobile push messaging services, and Scotland’s predictive analytics specialist GamesAnalytics, have announced a strategic partnership that should help games developers reach out and contact their users in new ways.
The specialism and skills in this partnership should allow greater engagement with games and allow developers/publishers to identify and target specific content for communication outside the context of the game, to keep players interested and drive greater pickup.
As we mentioned in the past, Games Analytics’ predictive modelling is being used by many companies around the world, to determine which gamers are most likely to churn, which are the most social and which are most likely to pay for virtual goods. This allows the company to target promotions and offers that increase retention and drive revenue.
By integrating Urban Airship’s messaging, players can be engaged through their smart phone, even when the specific game is not being played. Whether the players themselves find this feature useful or not is still open to question, but it gives developers a new way to keep in touch with players, no matter where they are and if they’ve not touched the game for some time.
Christopher Dean, the chief revenue officer for Urban Airship, said:
“Push messaging can deliver a dramatic uplift in user engagement and retention, especially when context is considered to deliver truly relevant and targeted messages. Our partnership with GamesAnalytics helps streamline the triggering of messages that hit the mark from the user’s perspective and positively impact the publisher’s bottom-line.”
Push notifications are proliferating in a growing number of apps, though they’ve yet to be used as part of a game’s actual mechanics. Oddly enough, push notification to mobiles was a concept pioneered by Scotland’s Digital Bridges, for its ultimately cancelled Star Trek MMO, developed in 2000 (when the future was the actual future…)
Games Analytics’ CEO Chris Wright (who worked at Digital Bridges, don’t you know), told us:
“We are delighted to be partnering with Urban Airship. GamesAnalytics’ technology suite already offers real-time in-game messaging using player segmented data from advanced predictive modeling. This integration will now enable developers to also reach out-of-game players in order to build engagement by delivering relevant offers and personalized experiences based on their playing behaviors.”
