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By Simon Fuller. Run it. Gamers with a need for speed might get a kick out of advergame outfit Matmi’s latest offering, Rooftop Runner, which sees players ripping through cities at breakneck pace in aid of Cancer Research UK.
The charity tasked Matmi with encouraging participation in its Run 10K events – more than 40 of which are slated to take place around the country in the autumn – and the game gets players navigating their way past famous British landmarks to collect ‘donations’, all the while racing the clock in a bid to make it to the start of a race on time.
“What you’re trying to do [with a charity game] is to make people aware and make them think,” says Jeff Coghlan, md at Matmi. “It’s about raising awareness, getting people to click-through. The click-through rate [for Rooftop Runner] is 10% at the moment, so we’ll have to see how that goes.
“Ideally we want e-mail addresses, to get people to pass it on,” he adds. “So other people take part in the game but also in the run. So they think ‘I can do this’ and take part. What we want to do is to get everyone to feature the game, not just games sites, but to get ISPs to feature it, get it into the press, to spread it.”
Matmi hopes to further the appeal of Rooftop Runner by utilising a neat little piece of tech – dynamic content modules. Deployed before on the popular Lily Allen advergame, Escape the Fear, this feature allows the company to change the content within games. In the case of Rooftop Runner, this means being able to update billboards seen in the game with the dates and locations of upcoming Run 10K events.
Even with all this nifty technology though, is it tougher making a game for a charity client, over any other type of brand?
“It is difficult as we’ve got to be more careful with charity guidelines,” explains Coghlan. “[You’ve] got to think how people will perceive it. When they play the game, they see the charity.”
But Matmi, whose previous work includes titles for Comic Relief, is keen to make the platform more appealing. “[Entertainment is] massively useful to [charities],” says Coghlan. “In the future, we’d like to do games that have in-game ads, but are not advergames as such. We’d get other [brands] to pay for ads within the game, so the [brands] are paying for the game and not the charities. And the brands get their mention in the game.”