The concept of rewards for referrals has surfaced in mobile phone gaming, with Gauteng company Refer-X launching its new service.
Refer-X has teamed up with cellular enabling software company Exactmobile, which reaches about two million cellphone users across all networks, to provide a referral scheme via mobile phones. The service allows anyone with a cellphone to recommend games to friends and be rewarded for doing so. The companies claim this is a world first.
"We`ve partnered with India`s top mobile game development studio, Paradox, as well as Nostromo from the Czech Republic, to bring two adventure games and five arcade games into the local market," says Refer-X founder Gareth Ocshe.
He says Paradox`s new branded Bollywood game, JURM, is also included and will be released in India and SA around the time of the movie release in India this month.
From Nostromo, Refer-X is bringing in 6Fears and Wrath of Orcs. Refer-X has also signed developers from Japan, Syria, France, the Netherlands and the US, and expects further titles for April release.
Users can download a game file from the specially coded Refer-X games in the Exactmobile catalogues for about R30. If they like a game, they can refer it to friends.
The person receiving the referral gets a link to buy the game and pricing information. The game users will be rewarded with a points-based credit towards the next content (games, ringtones, wallpapers, etc) they buy, for each time a friend buys the game they`ve referred.
"We believe the Refer-X product has great potential and is the catalyst required to drive mobile games to new levels," says Gavin Penkin, director of portal operations at Exactmobile. "Traditional marketing is very expensive and this form of referral will be of benefit to both buyer and seller."
As a partner, Blue Catalyst (a Blue IQ project helping to commercialise knowledge- and technology-intensive business ideas) has been actively working to help catalyse Ocshe`s and partner Tony Seebregts` business idea.
"We were attracted to the idea behind Refer-X not only because of its unique proposition, but because through sophisticated systems programming, it turns a very simple and ages-old model into a good business idea," says Blue Catalyst CEO Kevin Fleischer.
Based essentially on word-of-mouth referral, the pilot project will also establish how often people will refer a product for reward and how effective it will be as a sales channel.
"We only know of one study in South Korea which showed that over 40% of the market for cellular phone games was based on referrals," says Ocshe. "This makes viral marketing the number one channel - and it`s currently neither incentivised nor measured."
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