Farmville roll out promotion with Green Giant
Over the last year social gaming on sites such as Facebook has exploded, with millions of people logging on and playing every day, and millions of pounds spend on virtual transactions to enhance their game play. Well now social gaming giant Farmville (currently with 65m users, and 20m playing daily) has teamed up with Green Giant placing Farmville Cash coupon stickers (for ‘5 free farm cash’) on selected products in 4,000 supermarkets across the US.
It was reported on Mashable that in the six week pilot for the promotion, which was launched in Target Fresh Grocery and Super Target stores, there were more than 100,000 in virtual Farm Cash redeemed using the stickers which appeared on 25 different Green Giant products. The promotion was then expanded to supermarket nationwide as a result of the success of the pilot.
It is great to see how the social gaming space has seen such a fantastic increase (despite the hundreds of daily updates in my news feed), and will be interesting to see how it evolves. So, what do you think about the rise of social gaming? Do you think something as mainstream as the Green Giant promotion would take off in the UK?
July 26th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
There’s a fair amount of divided opinion over ‘casual-gaming’; some suggesting that it’s stifling originality, or that it’s dumbing-down videogames to make them easier, or even just popularising what was once a cult/geek (delete as necessary) pursuit. Either way the truth is undeniable; most people have played some sort of game in the recent past, whether on a mobile phone, on the internet or via console – and with market estimations of $1.5bn by 2014 ( http://bit.ly/aiWZSf ) gaming is clearly hear to stay.
August 24th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
I think both arguments are valid, my own personal opinion is that it is simply growing the gaming market. This may lead to someone who never would traditionally play games, to begin exerimenting with Farmville for example before eventually moving on to other games… maybe even investing in their own console etc.