Contests "Vkontakte": how to get the desired results and not "catch" a ban

Making money, having fun, it's all possible with entertainment apps. How can I create a Vkontakte game? What is needed for this, what investments and level of knowledge will be needed? Let's try to understand this topic.

Table of contents:

Concept

Forget about all the technical issues, the complexity of implementation and all the pitfalls that you will encounter during the development stage of your first game.

And I'm not just saying this. There are a huge number of good programmers who can implement any ideas. Advertisers and designers will take care of the look that will interest your future players and make them at least try what you have to offer.

All these are nuances. But the concept, or if you want, the idea - that's the most important thing in the development of the game.

You have to make the gameplay really interesting and fun. Without this, success cannot be achieved. Try to imagine yourself in the place of the player. Would you like to spend time playing this game yourself?

Technical points

Immediately be prepared for the fact that you will need knowledge from these areas:

JavaScript
Adobe Flash
Action Script

First steps in developer service

In the process of creating a game, you will in any case come across a service for developers. It is available at:

https://vk.com/dev

This is what the main page looks like.

We are interested in the section "iFrame/Flash applications for Vkontakte". Let's go there.

We get acquainted with the interface, scroll down the page, and follow the link "How to create a Vkontakte application".

We receive a message that Flash and iFrame applications will be available for work. And we are offered to follow this link to get started:

https://vk.com/editapp?act=create

We open it, and we see the dialog box for creating an application. Fill in all required fields.

Name
Type (select IFrame/Flash application)
Description
Type (game)
Category

Then press "Go to app download".

You will need to open the notifications on your phone, request a verification SMS, and enter it into the form. After confirmation passes, you will be redirected to the information page.

We get acquainted with the rules, scroll down the page to the very bottom, and click "I agree with the new rules".

We check the correctness of the entered information, and upload the graphics (screenshots, cover).

We have prepared everything you need. The point is small - to develop the technical part, upload it to Vkontakte, and launch our game. But this is the material of a completely separate article.

Conclusion

Now you imagine the process of creating a game. Of course, in general terms. But the topic of programming is too broad to fit in one material.

Questions?

In contact with

Nowadays, social networks have tightly entered the life of almost every modern person. It is, first of all, a cheap alternative source of entertainment. A huge amount of time is spent on the Internet for communication, reading news, watching movies and, of course, playing games. Playing an unpretentious toy is a great way to relax, cheer yourself up, distract yourself from problems and abstract from the outside world.

Social network games are among the most popular games in the world, with tens of millions of players from different countries. Russia is no exception in this respect. In the applications section, you can find games for every taste, but it also happens that you want to play something new, but you don’t want to surf the Internet. What to do in such a case. The answer is simple - add the application yourself. Surely, many had such a desire, but the necessary skills for this were absent.

In fact, everything is much simpler than it seems. This is a very interesting and exciting process that does not require high computer literacy. This video details how to add your favorite game to the most popular social network - VKontakte.

Video tutorial "How to create a game on VKontakte"

Creating a game on VKontakte - detailed instructions:

Open your page in Vkontakte.
Go to the My Settings menu.
There will be clickable buttons at the bottom of the page. Click on the "Developers" button.
On the right side of the page that opens, there will be a big blue "Create Application" button. Click on her.
In the menu that opens for creating an application, select the third item: IFrame / Flash application. A description field opens, where you should specify what the meaning of the created game is. In the "Name" field, enter the name of the future game. Click on the "Proceed to download application" button.
In the confirmation window that opens, enter your phone number and click on the "Get Code" button. In the field that opens, enter the confirmation code received in the SMS message and send.
In the "Information" tab, select the application group, if any.
In the "Settings" tab in the "Status" line, select the item "The application is enabled and visible to everyone."
Go to the site http://games.online.ua. Select any game, click on it. Under the window that opens with a demonstration of the game, there will be a button "Download game". Hover over it and press Ctrl+U. A window with text will open.
Press the combination Ctrl + F; the search bar will open. Enter the following into it: .swf.
Download Master must be installed on the computer. You can download it from the site:

http://www.softportal.com/get-1519-do... 12. Copy the found address without quotes. Open Download Master. The copied address appears in the link window. Press the "Start Upload" button. The file has downloaded.

Go to the application in VKontakte. In the "Download SWF Application" section, click on "Download Application". In the window that opens, click on "Choose file" and select the downloaded file.
Repeat the steps outlined in paragraph 6.
If everything is done correctly, the inscription appears: "The application was successfully loaded."
Go to the "Information" tab. Fill in the name field, description (if any), insert an icon (saving its image from the site where the game was taken from). Save changes.
Check application performance. To do this, go to "My Applications" and start the game. If it starts up and works, then everything is done correctly.

Now, after watching the video, each user on VKontakte will be able to easily create any applications and play independently added games. Everything is easy and simple!

As a rule, customers of "social" games have one of the following motives. Try on for yourself:

Create a game with very simple, but such ingenious mechanics. Be the first to think of it, open your own Klondike, quickly earn money, fame and universal love.

Developer comment: Surprisingly, all Tetris, pacmen and arkanoid games have long been invented. It is difficult to invent and then offer the market a truly original idea. No one will give you guarantees that if Tetris were made today, and not 30 years ago, then it would also become a craze. Competition, anyway.

As examples, quotes about " stuffing houses" and other folk creatives are excellent. Such projects simply do not get into production. Which is expected. The second motive is a little closer to reality:

Create a game with already known gameplay, not to reinvent the wheel, but to implement it in such a way that you want to play it. Attract users. Add monetization and earn.

Developer comment: Already better, but another problem pops up: why will people play your new farming simulator, and not the one that occupies the first line in the "Popular" directory? And attracting players is generally a separate item (and a separate budget, by the way), which is often forgotten about.

We will not go far for examples - and look into the VK catalog. We pull out several million-dollar games at random. We get:

The right side - the original progenitors, the left - "socialized" versions of popular games.

As you can see, there are few innovations in the projects, but the work on running interfaces, graphics, sound and calculation of monetization systems is colossal.

A very small percentage of customers decide to invest in such complex projects. The rest prefer to limit themselves to the banal transfer of familiar and simple gameplay to a social network. This is how they are born:

Games familiar from childhood: tic-tac-toe, "spot the differences", "bald" and so on.
All kinds of card games: from poker to "Magic: the Gathering".
Casual arcade games: like the well-known Lines and Tetris.
Games "ported" to VK from consoles twenty years ago.

Examples of “simple” games in terms of gameplay and mechanics are in the VKontakte catalog.

Finally, the third motive of the customer, which leads him to the developer:

Develop a branded game for a social network. Its meaning is brand advertising inside the game, receiving intangible profit in the form of communication (brand-consumer communication) and lead generation (creating a community of loyal users through the game).

Developer comment: A branded game performs slightly different, non-mercantile functions. Its purpose is to increase brand trust and attract traffic to groups. And then, for example, if you have an online store, you can provide it with an additional flow of visitors.

If you set out to create a branded game, you have two scenarios:

Temporary branding of an already running game. If you should ask the administration of VKontakte properly (conditions). Of course, the more players, the more expensive the accommodation will be.

Development of your own game for your brand. Here you take on a double responsibility: to make an interesting project and introduce a brand into it so that it does not irritate the players.

From current experience:

A great way to brand the game and win the loyalty of the players is to introduce the brand gradually. For example, in Happy Farmer (2009), at a certain stage of the game, users were given the opportunity to purchase a Lay's chips factory, in a similar project, Farmandia (2011), a Bystrov brand factory, and in Favorite Farm, a Calve restaurant.

The branded element solved two problems at once:

Transitions to the group: 1 665 172.
Users who joined the community: 150,000 people.
Churn from the group after the end of the branding period: less than 3%.

Branded apps and games on social networks are becoming more suitable for advertising. Moreover, this is a “new level” advertisement - not causing negative, unobtrusive and even pleasant. And a brand that has chosen such a “humane” way to the consumer as its tactics will always win.

Community promotion in social media VKontakte networks are a rather delicate and complex job, requiring both the availability of material resources and the ability to notice all sorts of subtleties, thanks to which you can prevail over competing communities. Even the smallest detail, which may seem unimportant, can lead to quite positive results in terms of promotion and promotion of your community.

In this article, we will pay attention to a number of important and useful nuances that you should take into account not only when promoting a community, but also at the initial stage - when creating a community.

The very first question that confronts most users who decide to create their first own project on VKontakte is the question of the type of community, namely, what to create: a group or a public page (public). The main advantages and disadvantages of each type of community will be described next.

Obvious advantages and disadvantages of various types of VKontakte communities:

A public page (public) is a type of community that is best suited for entertainment projects. Its purpose is to convey information to the participants in a simple and quick way. In addition to the topics already mentioned, publics are also great for informative projects - for official pages of enterprises and companies, educational pages, and more. However, if your goal is to make money, then this type of community is just what you need.

Benefits of public pages:

ease of promotion;
profitable advertising platform;
display in the "Interesting pages" block, which is a positive quality when promoting.

Disadvantages of public pages:

reduced features compared to groups - for example, the inability to create a menu;
the difficulty to interest the user so that he returns in the future. Although, however, it depends on the subject of the community and the quality of its content.

A group is a type of community that is best suited for shopping and business topics. The main benefit of groups is that they make it easier to build a consistent audience of members.

Group benefits:

the activity of participants is an order of magnitude higher than in public pages;
the ability to set the menu and the availability of tools for its creation;
the presence of a discussion section for communication and assistance to participants;
the ability to use wiki markup (wiki);
the function of inviting friends to the group.

Group Disadvantages:

groups do not monetize well, because ads in groups are bought less often than in public pages.

Some important aspects when choosing the theme of a new community, as well as its monetization:

When creating a new community, first of all, take the choice of topics seriously, because the difficulty of promotion will depend on this stage. Topics must be chosen in such a way as to interest not only the younger generation, but also older people. Some studies have shown that most often advertising is bought in communities with an audience over 18 years old. Why? But because schoolchildren, according to advertisers, do not own material resources, which means they are not able to make purchases on the Internet. When promoting, try to achieve such indicators that the school audience in the community does not exceed 70%.

How to choose a topic? Everything is simple. The main thing here is to understand which topics are well monetized. An obvious example is business topics (marathons, CPA, banks, loans, information products, etc.). Also, pretty good topics are women's pages, educational or something on the topic of humor.

The subsequent income from the project will depend solely on you, on how you approach the promotion of your community. So, even a community with an active audience of 10,000 people will be much more profitable than a community with 500,000 members, but with the least activity, say, 1,000 people a day.

Earning methods:

sale of advertising spaces;
participation in affiliate programs;
sale of own information products;
opening an online store.

The activity of the user audience is the most important factor in promotion, which is of great importance if the main goal is monetization.

Promotion ˜ is not only about filling the community with all sorts of content, it is also about increasing the number of subscribers and motivating subscribers to be as active as possible. The most active audience is female. Girls are the most active, they constantly buy something, discuss, evaluate and tell their friends on their wall. In addition to girls, the younger generation, that is, schoolchildren, is also highly active; however, this particular audience is not suitable for us for the reasons described above.

Women-themed communities have a lot of competition, but don't worry. Since communities of this kind are more difficult to promote, in the future, having reached certain heights, you can earn good money. A huge selection of sites reduces the price of advertising space, but increases the number of orders.

About filling communities and types of published content:

Content plays an important role in promotion. High-quality, unique and informative posts are what will set you apart from other communities. Try not to abuse hackneyed materials. Focus on creating your own content, come up with something new. Users will not want to read your feed if it contains overused posts collected from all popular communities.

The most relevant types of information:

bright, colorful and informative images;
humorous materials; but again, try to look for something rare that others do not have;
some interesting facts;
tests and puzzles;
beautiful photographs, landscapes, quotes, collections of audio and video recordings.

For communities, the least relevant:

long sheets - records containing voluminous texts (since they are only suitable for educational communities with highly specialized topics);
non-unique and hackneyed content;
stupid and uninteresting jokes;
images with lost quality;
misuse of advertising materials;
records that prompt the user to go to external resources to access detailed information;
posts that have nothing to do with the topic of your community.

Free methods of promotion in the social network VKontakte:

This is probably the most relevant part of this article, which will be useful for both beginners and experienced PR people.

Don't be too zealous with these methods, because they can lead to blocking the community. It is especially important not to put free promotion methods above the rest. Use them, but don't overdo it. So the methods are:

Spam on walls, private messages and comments. Try to spam communities with the same topic as yours, or the one closest to yours. Spam messages should be adequate and reasonable, and also contain not only a link to your project, but also some kind of intelligible description, so that after reading it, the user himself would want to visit your community. Do not limit yourself to one account, get yourself a few pieces (5-10 are possible). And again, do not overdo it - no one has canceled complaints about communities. Complain - get a ban.
Fraud contests. This method is widespread, and therefore relevant. The most obvious example that everyone has probably come across is “repost, get likes and get an iPhone 5”.
Exchange of promotional messages with partner groups. This method is the most adequate and unobtrusive for promotion. You will get a lot of interested participants who will show good activity in the future.

This is where all the main subtleties of promotion end. Also, do not forget that there are a considerable number of other subtleties of VK promotion. Read more articles on this topic to know more, and you will become a professional VKontakte PR man. That's all for me. Thank you for your attention!