If you’re going to play games, you might as well get someone to reward you for it. PrizeRoom will do just that with a casual games site that gives away prizes from major advertisers and brands.
The Roswell, Ga.-based company is launching its site today in an effort to get gamers more engaged with brands and get advertisers a better return on their dollars spent on internet campaigns. The site offers a wide array of free games such as puzzles, brain teasers, action challenges, contests and sweepstakes.
There’s a lot of competition in this space from WorldWinner, King.com and GameDuell. Other sites with prizes for some of their games include Electronic Arts’ Pogo.com and Iwon.com. But PrizeRoom chief executive Jim Seltzer says that the company’s twist on these games is better. Ads are built into the games and players compete for prizes. But the game isn’t the same every time. For instance, trivia games have a wide variety of questions, with the difficulty depending on how well the player does.
The company can do the same kind of game for a bunch of advertisers, but it can instantly change the background and look and feel of the game to suit each individual advertiser. By contrast, other casual games are static, with little change from one round to the next. It’s so easy to customize games that some employees have taken the games and customized them for training quizes, such as tests on sexual harrassment training or anti-bribery training.
Players enter their real information such as home address, because that’s the way they can receive their prizes. The games are organized into categories such as Knowledge Games. You see a graphic, brief description, and the prize you’ll get if you play the game well.
The site has been in beta testing for some time. It launched for limited testing in July, 2007, and then opened up for broader testing in July of this year. Now it’s formally launching. PrizeRoom’s games show consistently high user “dwell times” of at least 17 minutes for 60 percent of the players. About 13.2 percent of players stayed on the site for an hour or more.
The company claims that it can get on average four times the amount spent on a game compared to regular game pages. I played the Thanksgiving game on Sunday night and it was fairly buggy. A couple of times, after I played, the game screen didn’t fully load. There was nothing particularly exciting about the trivia game about turkeys. But if I won the prize, I was eligible for a coupon at Wal-Mart. The most popular game on the site now is Gem Swap, where the grand prize is a Disney vacation. That game is fairly addictive, but it’s your typical clone of Bejeweled, where you match three gems.
PrizeRoom’s data engine captures online metrics and user data so that marketers can learn who played the game, how often they played, where they came from and more. The marketers can quickly determine their return on investment and adjust the game play, prizes and other incentives for the best results.
The company isn’t targeting kids but rather older male and female heads of households who are attractive to brand advertisers. The casual game market hit $2.25 billion in revenues in 2007 and is expected to grow 20 percent this year, according to the Casual Games Association.
PrizeRoom is a division of InterMark, Inc., which through its QuizMaster Productions subsidiary has more than 25 years of experience making corporate game shows and quizes. The company has worked for two and a half years on the technology behind the site. PrizeRoom’s funding comes from InterMark. But Seltzer said the company is talking to possible investors about outside funding.
PrizeRoom has seven full-time employees but it can tap as many as 40 other employees in the rest of InterMark.