Digital Chocolate has designated its latest social racing game as an exclusive release on Spil Games, which has a collection of gaming sites with more than 200 million monthly active users combined.
Digital Chocolate is promoting Race Track Rivals (pictured above) as an exclusive for a limited time before it releases the game more broadly.
Hilversum, Netherlands-based Spil Games has grown into a big social gaming network in the past two years, with a focus on teens, girls, and families. In fact, it is getting close to the number of gamers on Facebook, which has 251 million. And Digital Chocolate has noticed. The company has already released its Galaxy Life and Zombie Lane games on Spil, but this is its first exclusive.
“Spil has arguably the largest growing audience of users that are gamers, first and foremost,” said Jason Loia, the chief operating officer at Digital Chocolate, in an email to GamesBeat. “This was a key factor in why we had such great success with Galaxy Life on Spil, and we wanted to take that success to a new level by doing an exclusive title debut on their network. We were also eager to work closely with Spil on launching a title like Racetrack Rivals, which would fit extremely well with their type of gamer. We continue to be extremely impressed with their focus on games and the way they meticulously manage the success of their partner content.”
Racing games are normally the domain of young males, but the audience on Spil Games has become pretty diverse, said Erik Goossens, the chief operating officer at Spil, in an interview with GamesBeat. Goossens says the game market is increasingly competitive. Companies that previously released games on Facebook are spreading out so they can get a return on investment from a distribution channel. Spil provides analytics, guidance, and promotion for its games.
That proved attractive to Digital Chocolate, which tested previously launched games on Spil first. Galaxy Life has been played more than 230 million times, and it is seeing “solid retention and a stickiness rate on par with Facebook,” said Goossens. There isn’t a lot of overlap with Facebook, either.
“This is good news for our company and the games market at large,” said Goossens, who joined Spil in August. “They are trusting us with their newest baby.”
Race Track Rivals is available across Spil Games’ teen and family social-gaming platforms in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, and Dutch. Digital Chocolate has more than 100 games on 200 different websites in 80 countries. Spil Games has platforms such as GirlsgoGames and a variety of other sites. It keeps a percentage of the revenue and will promote the Digital Chocolate title, but it did not otherwise offer a financial incentive for the exclusive.