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Opinion: What Halloween teaches us about the horror of event-based marketing

Is your update a zombie?

Opinion: What Halloween teaches us about the horror of event-based marketing
Pippa Middleton is known for a number of things: her bum; that her sister will one day be Queen of Great Britain; and for being nice but a little dim.

Indeed, such is her vulnerability to satire that one wags has set up a parody twitter account (@pippatips), to suggest the sort of advice that Middleton - a party organiser, apparently - might dish out.

"A fun way to liven up a Halloween party is to wear fancy dress" is one of the recent informative tweets.

How we laughed.

But as the Eve of All Hallows spins round again in its usual bluster of glowing pumpkins heads, trickles of fake blood and mudpacked zombie-green face paint, maybe it's mobile game developers who should be seriously thinking about where they can get some real 'brainsssss, brainssssss....' when it comes to making the most of occasion-oriented marketing.

Can the dead dance?

The fact is that as Halloween has become a global celebration - one that encompasses everything from kids' trick or treating, to the Mexican Day of the Dead, mass grocery retailing, themed TV/cinema nights, and a general party atmosphere that for some surpasses Christmas in its potential for existential revelry - so it's become increasingly crowded as an opportunity for targeted marketing.

Of course, it's clear any game verging on the blacker edge of content - involving zombies, vampires, skeletons, denizens, blood, vague anti-heroes etc - needs to somehow incorporate the season within its wider update cycle - at least to sate the bloodlust of its existing players.

However, given the number of titles now using Halloween as one of their key dates to roll out new content, I'd suggest even 'black games' need to be thinking seriously about whether Halloween is as important as they'd like.

(Similarly no one should bother attempting to launch a game on Halloween, unless it is a game based on the Halloween movie licence.)

Painted it very black

You might blame George Schulz, Charlie Brown and his Great Pumpkin Patch, or Tim Burton and The Nightmare Before Christmas, or perhaps just Twilight for kicking of the recent revival, but, as any game journalist can tell you, our inboxes have been filling up for weeks with emails entitled "Halloween updates adds creepy content to...."

Perhaps, if I was a committed player of a vaguely horror-themed game, I might be interested, but when the titles after the "to..." include casual puzzlers, social Ville-style games, indeed pretty much every genre and any game, it all fades into the same shade of pale grey as the imagined undead's distempered torso.

It's a similar situation for consumers.

Given the number of games people have installed on their phones and tablets, the bigger the number of games that the App Store (or whatever other store) is telling them to update, the less likely they are to engage with any of them.

(Smart developers who have added Halloween content without updating their game's binary can award themselves a (poisoned) apple for their cleverness.)

Think local, take it global

Of course, the point of the argument isn't just about Halloween; it's about the issues surrounding any universal opportunities for viral game marketing of which Halloween is merely the current favourite.

A couple of years ago, it was all about Christmas releases/updates, but that obvious consumer touch point is now reserved for companies with proper marketing budgets, not those indies looking to take a chance on serendipity.

Simply put, such real-world occasions just don't cut it in the ultra-competitive world of user retention and acquisition.

I'd even suggest the more niche - globally observed - days (Saint Patrick's Day, Talk Like A Pirate Day, Earth Day etc) are becoming more difficult to use to leverage user attention.

Still, there are plenty of opportunities to take smaller, sometimes geographically restricted, occasions and bring them to a much wider audience. That's what Rovio did so successfully with Angry Birds Seasons, perhaps the smartest, cheapest marketing move it ever made.

And that's where developers are far more likely to make an impact, especially for those occasions that last for more than just a day....

Hold on, what's that you say? What follows Halloween? That's easy - remember, remember the fifth of Movember.

Now there's two thoughts.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.