Today ad offer network Super Rewards and iList, publisher of the Twitter-based text RPG Spymaster, announced a partnership that would let Super Rewards drive monetization in Spymaster across multiple gaming platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and the iPhone. When users sign up to play Spymaster, they will be able to access their account and accept Super Rewards offers from any platform they use to play the game. A player can begin a day's session on his or her iPhone, then continue their progress through Twitter or Facebook.
"We built our platform from the early days to be really open. We didn't want to be wedded to any particular social or game network. We wanted to be able to recognize that users are the same users across all platforms and target to whatever platform they happen to be coming online from that day," said Super Rewards CEO Jason Bailey.
Super Rewards's partnership with Spymaster should come as no surprise. Super Rewards is currently the only ad offer network supporting Twitter games and the company stated they were speaking to Spymaster about monetization support only a few months ago. While users will not be able to purchase currency directly in the iPhone version, they can accept Super Rewards offers in order to obtain currency. Likewise, virtual items users have acquired during play will be available to their account across all play platforms.
iList CEO and Spymaster creator Chris Evad says that Spymaster has been surprised by strong user response to the introduction of virtual goods into the game. Spymaster opted to include virtual goods simply so the game had some way of monetizing traffic and designed its first wave of virtual items based on stories they read users sharing as they played on Twitter.
"Initially there was a backlash, but a lot of the people who really were the most vocal about hating it were the ones who got really into buying the points. Those are the passionate players," said Evad. "We found out people would pay for more energy, for more powerful items. Some of them will buy special items that guarantee automatic kills."
Spymaster is the leading social game on Twitter, a category that is still not quite as big as Bailey might have expected when Super Rewards began supporting Twitter games earlier this year. Both Bailey and Evad chalk the slow growth of games on Twitter to the sheer youth of the platform. Evad also notes that Twitter does not, at this point, include any features that would encourage users to use the platform for games. Regardless, Spymaster has turned into a success now that it has a way to monetize.
"Not revealing any specific numbers, but I can tell you that the CTM and average earnings per use [Evad] makes for Spymaster are the kinds of numbers most game companies drool and dream about and don't even think are possible," said Bailey.
