I don’t know how you feel about sponsor games/areas, I do know how other people felt, but I always loved sponsor games and their limited time prizes, my only gripe was that they were often limited to the United States. But my question is, did you make all of sponsor games? I know you made some of them, but for others were you instead sent a game and asked to host it on the site? Because I remember “Dracula’s Maze Game,” around Autumn 2012, was seen on a few sites besides Neopets.
That would mean that browser-based Flash game movie tie-ins aren’t/weren’t just a Neopets thing, but an industry-wide thing. So when that stopped, when movies stopped asking for Flash game tie-ins, would you say that’s the sign of the shift from browser-based Flash games being as relevant as they were? Was that the time when it was officially time to stop playing browser based Flash games, and do… whatever it is that replaced them? Mobile games? How did kids’ movies market themselves after Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2?
Hi, again! So hopefully I can answer this properly. There’s… a lot to unpack here. ? Also, disclaimer: this is mostly marketing stuff, which I wasn’t involved in too much so I could be misremembering quite easily. I’ll do my best!
Making our own sponsor games: Most of the time yup but very occasionally no. So the way these worked is we offered different packages to the sponsor, from just ads all the way up to a full land or a full custom event, with most packages including a game engine that would be reskinned. These were games we’d already done, either for the site or for previous sponsorships, that had been prepped for re-use specifically for this kind of thing because we became very efficient at it. (Though if the budget was big enough, there could be a special custom game done.) There were game engines ready for all kinds of budgets, and the Sales Team (later Marketing) would come up with stories or themes or other branding for the specific engines that fit the budget, then work with the sponsor on whatever they picked. Occasionally, though, the sponsor would have their own game that they were using on multiple sites and want to use that instead, for consistency in their marketing or less approval time or any number of reasons. It wasn’t ideal, mostly because we’d still have to port the game to Neopets (not just add Send Score, but usually also bot/scam prevention, etc.) and that could be a day or a week or… not possible at all. But if it worked out, then yeah, they could use their own game. I don’t think this first started happening until much later though… well into Viacom days when Flash games were a thing on other sites too so sponsors had them already (see below). I think Marketing even made a package specifically for that request eventually.
Neopets vs Industry-wide: The Dohring Company (who partnered with A&D to found NeoPets, Inc.) touted it all the time as their “invention”. As far as I know, that was true, as in Neopets was the first big integration of that kind of sponsorship. (And I think some term for it was even trademarked.) And it then caught on elsewhere, both because of that and the way Doug Dohring marketed it. He did tons of interviews for tv, publications, and websites, they made videos about it, he gave talks… all that jazz.
Flash games being less relevant/movie marketing: Flash games were still plenty relevant long after advertisers began passing on them. What replaced them there was video, which was cheaper, easier to produce, more adaptable across the web, more accessible to eyeballs, had higher click-thru rates, etc., etc. It’s the reason Viacom had us add Neovision. Flash games on their own were still plenty popular, not only on Neopets but tons of other sites we were comparing notes with. But yeah, as far as non-advertising goes, mobile-accessible games eventually took over. (Which basically started with HTML-5 games and then on to better technologies and app ecosystems, but at the core was the fact that you could play on mobile devices.)
Kid’s movie marketing: Yeah, video. Basically what they’d already been doing on TV all along. ?
Hope that made sense! (And that I’m remembering it all properly.)