Why Location Based Leaderboards are great for you game? Ask Penny!

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Think of Penny in  The Big Bang Theory. (pause…) Ah yes, Penny! ;)

In contrast to the rest of the group, Penny is not well-educated, savvy in a specific technical field and surely not a hardcore gamer. However she has great social skills, common sense, very knowledgeable about pop culture and likes to play games with the guys.

Hence she isn’t going to be engaged by playing against the boys or ranked worldwide where she is buried amongst millions of gamers. And definitely will not be able to find commonality within her group.

But give her the chance to compete within The Cheese Cake Factory where she works, and she’ll keep pushing those buttons until she becomes the local queen. And who knows, she might even teach Sheldon and Leonard a lesson.

Traditional game platforms (such as  Xbox Live,  PSNetwork, or OpenFeint in mobile games) primarily cater hardcore gamers. Thus, the competitive features found in traditional platform services (rankings, achievements) only satisfy hardcore gamers like Sheldon and Leonard thriving to be on top within their own community.

With increasing growth of mobile and casual games, we’ve entered a paradox where mid-core and casual gamers are reaching higher spending power, but find themselves lost and unengaged in these traditional networks.

And studies show, leaderboards and ranking tables are a proven method to increase competition in all kinds of games, and thus, user engagement.

Geosophic’s Location based leaderboards can increase engagement for gamers like Penny!

Location based leaderboards include rankings that show the best players not only worldwide, but within the current country, region, city and even neighborhood.

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Thus, working professionals, housewives, executives and Pennys all over the world can gain sense of achievement without needing to spend hours on those games.

Do you want the Pennys of the world return and engaged in your game?

Well, now you know the secret. Make them feel relevant. Add some Location-Based Leaderboards and turn them into local heroes and heroines.

Switching from OpenFeint to Geosophic

These days, OpenFeint’s shutdown is putting tons of pressure in mobile game developers that relied on their service for leaderboards and achievements. Luckily, there are quite a few interesting alternatives out there. Besides Apple’s GameCenter, there are some pretty flexible services such as Scoreoid. And Geosophic, of course, can also be a solution in these times of need. Specially, if you’re interested in bringing some geolocation magic to your game in Android, iOS or Unity. Why using Geosophic as an alternative to OpenFeint? The main reason would be speed. With the Christmas season looming on the horizon and Apple’s approval procedures taking up to 3 weeks, there isn’t much time for small developers to build something out of scratch. Our leaderboards are easy to integrate. In one afternoon of playing with the system you will be already seeing some results. Plus, of course, it’s also a free service up to 10,000 daily API calls (which, trust us, is waaaay more than most studios need. And just in case, you have a 90 day free-trial period to measure this.) Of course, there are differences between Geosophic and OpenFeint that you should be aware of:
  • Our leaderboards fit your UI, not the other way round: OpenFeint had this unattractive grey/green design that disrupted the gaming experience. That’s quite the opposite of what we want to achieve. We do provide a default template for the leaderboards, but we’re happy to work with you to make the rankings fit your game’s design.
  • Everyone gets a shot at being a leader: OpenFeint offered just leaderboards on a worldwide level. Sure, that’s appealing for the super-ultra-mega-hardcore players, but what about your mid-core fans that also have a life? By serving leaderboards also at a city and country level, you create new layers of competition, tripling the amount of people engaged by them. Of course, if you want to have just the regular vanilla-flavoured global rankings, our technology is perfectly capable to handle it too.
  • We give you all the metrics: By bringing geolocation into the mix we’re capable of producing some pretty cool metrics. To begin with, we can tell you, at a city-level, who are your key user-segments according to their engagement (do your players in London behave the same way as the ones in Manchester?). Plus, it all comes served through our beautiful, highly visual, dashboard (Seriously, it’s so cool even Batman would use it to track crime!).
How can I give it a try? Our support wizards are hard at work, looking how best we can facilitate migrating from OpenFeint to our system. For the time being, please, feel free to sign up and look around. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything :) . What about the ‘achievements’ and the rest of OpenFeint stuff? Oh boy, I’m glad that you asked. In Geosophic we have quite a few disruptive ideas of how to improve the world of gaming platforms and 2013 is going to be packed with releases and new features. From FB integration (why create yet-another-social-network if we can build on the shoulders of giants?), to some unique solutions for cross-game promotion based on geolocation, plus crunchy multi-player features and achievements. And if there’s anything that you feel has been missing through all your developer’s life, please, shoot us an e-mail. We’ll only be too happy to listen and put our wizards (and maybe even some dragons) to work and make it happen.

Welcome to Geosophic gaming platform

Geosophic is a gaming platform that offers location based services for mobile games. You might have heard about us when James Nouch wrote about Geosophic at Pocket Gamer, or if you have been following the last Startup Bootcamp edition in Amsterdam, but if not then let me introduce you to the most important things that define our core:

We believe in the power of geolocated metrics: Let’s face it, mobile gamers left home a long time ago. Every single day, they are generating massive amounts of information, not only about what they’re playing, but about where and when they do it. If we’re able to follow them in their daily routines and journeys we will learn all kinds of fascinating things about their environment, behaviour and context – about who they really are in their offline lives.

Every gamer deserves to be the best: A location based ranking system gives everyone a shot at becoming the local gaming star of their city, region or country. And it’s something that can be easily implemented in any mobile gamer or app.

It’s not about ads anymore, but about targeted recommendations: We are using this amazing geolocated metrics to build a trending games recommendation engine that offers targeted recommendations based on:

  • Games that are popular in the player location.
  • Interest game genres of the player.
  • Recommendations based on friends likes.

And this is only the beginning… Check out our amazing video to learn more about us or sign up to try our platform for free.