Making Money with Games

It's been an awesome few months working for OGPlanet, an online free-to-play games publisher. They are a Korean run company based out of Los Angeles, CA with another office here in Vancouver (where most of the magic happens) and one in Korea. Basically what my company does is takes games that were created in foreign countries (usually Korea) and "Americanizes" them for the western world. Translations, technical changes and basically an overall marketing transformation is needed to capture a new audience for the games. After testing and making sure the games will be successful, OGPlanet will transform these games and put them on the market for the ever-increasing amount of players who take part in online gaming. We make our money through micro-transactions by selling virtual items in our games for small amounts of money. With the hundreds of thousands of players we have, you can see that this type of business model would be successful.

Over the years, video games have evolved from playing very simple games such as tetris, pac-man and other single-player games to massive multiplayer online games where millions of people from around the world can simultaneously play with each other and interact on a social level as well. From playing with your best friend right beside you to playing with someone you don't know from Germany or China or South Africa really makes you think about how far we have come with technology.

In my job, my responsibility is to make sure as many people as possible are seeing our games, thinking about them, and eventually trying them out. We display banners of our games on websites that the types of people who generally play our games go to. This could be video game fan sites, blogs, review sites or any others we feel may get visitors who might like to play our games. I am in charge of a budget and am constantly talking with AdNetworks who display our banners, making sure that everything is running smoothly and I also assist our design team with the creation of these banners. I come up with the words and phrases and they do all the fancy stuff. I also work with websites to come up with other promotional ideas such as prize giveaways and ways to increase the attention on our games.

To keep our players with us we do lots of things to make sure they are happy and involved. We have lots of fun events for people to participate in and I generally organize a lot of the material and communication necessary to run these events. Research is also an important part of my job as I am constantly seeing what the current trends are in the gaming market, what our competitors are doing and look into better ways we can promote our games.

Overall I'm having a great time here and learning a lot every day. Doing something that I love makes waking up early and going in every day not feel so bad. Being by a computer all day really gets me motivated to do active things though. I go to the gym most days at lunch and soccer takes up at least 3 nights a week. One after-work thing that has very much declined since I've been working here, can you guess? Gaming...