Cross Media Specialist Christy Dena has written up some excellent notes on stats for ARGS on her blog. She’s included all the major ARGS of the last few years, including The Beast, I Love Bees, Perplexcity, The Lost Experience, World Without Oil and Regenesis. This is a really good and valuable roundup, and shows some interesting patterns.
Marketing seems to be key to massive take-up – the biggest ARGS are those commissioned for a major product launch (The Beast/I Love Bees/The H3ist) or alongside a TV show (The Lost Experience/Heroes). This probably reflects the super-sized budgets that these ARGS have compared to more home-brewed games such as Meigeist or Lockjaw. There are only a couple of ’stand-alone’ ARGS that have achieved any kind of scale – EA’s Majestic from 2001 (with a reported $10m budget – yikes!) and MindCandy’s PerplexCity. This is one of the biggest issues within the ARG world at the moment – are they destined to just be funky marketing tactics, or are they the first truly new entertainment format to come along since the growth of the web?
