Can Small Games Support Small Business?

At the beginning of this month, Multi Axis Games (a small video game development company located in Port Angeles, WA), launched the public testing phase of the first persistent video game for Twitter titled, Tweet Lord (www.tweetlord.com). Twitter is a popular social networking site which serves more than seven million people world wide. Lead Programmer Marcia Burrows describes Tweet Lord as “a free casual role playing game that expands the social dynamic of Twitter by offering a large range of game actions with Twitter users can interact and form relationships.”

Tweet Lord went from testing to its live version last week while simultaneously announcing their first corporate sponsor. The game’s sponsor is also a small local business, Olympic Cellars, which is a women owned winery creating and selling a selection of wines as well as sponsoring local women focused charities and hosting local events.

While it is not unusual for big business to sponsor entertainment ventures in order to garner some amount of publicity while also raising the public profile of the entertainment they are sponsoring, the idea of a small entertainment company and small retail businesses allying in this way is a new idea.

According to Multi Axis Games Art Director, Eli Owens, “many new features were added to Tweet Lord during the live testing. Many of these additions were inspired by player feedback such as quick buttons, new tutorials, and additional game actions.” The new aspect of the game ushered in through the game’s taking on of a sponsor is the ability for players to locate special items which contain promotional codes that can be used to receive discounts on products from the sponsor.

During this time in which big business is flailing and the economy is looking increasingly to small businesses to innovate, create new jobs, and generate economic growth, it will be interesting to see whether or not this sort of team work within the small business community will have a catalyzing effect. If such an arrangement can be proven effective, it could usher in a new era of small business alliances. Many other local retail companies are already looking to this initial alliance with interest, and will use its success to determine whether they too should join in this group promotional effort.

The ultimate test of this new form of publicity will come in the middle of this month, when Olympic Cellars launches a new product, using a sponsored item spot in Tweet Lord as a main facet of the product’s debut advertising push. Multi Axis Games founder Margaret Staples states that this experiment has been ventured to answer a number of questions: “Will this small community be able to garner large scale attention by combining our business forces? Can team work and ingenuity compete with the sheer volume of advertising dollars that monolithic corporate retailers can bring to bear? Only time and the votes of each dollar spent will truly tell.”