The following guest article is by Gus Pineda, Director of Development at TAPQUAD Inc

Designing and developing video games for multi-platforms is a challenging, time-consuming and expensive proposition by itself and even more complex and expensive to promote to be able to sell.

Reaching the optimal audience requires effort from all of the teams involved in designing the go-to market campaigns and selecting the “right” platform to put the game into consideration for its target audience.

Until today, every platform required its own set of tailored assets for the awareness campaigns, digital or in the real world, and we have been OK with it – because we really had no choice.

For example, a game is available for Apple App Store, Google Play Store and Amazon App Store. To promo this game, you need to design three campaigns oriented to each App Store requirements. That is the standard today, meaning 3X effort to create campaigns with different budgets, assets, planning, execution, and measuring the results.

While promoting the game, and depending on the advertising or sharing platform, you will need to use the app store link; these links are long, not human-friendly, not easy to remember, not easy to share or add in print material or outdoor advertising.  This situation has forced to use each badge for the App Stores on everything, to let the users know where the game is available making it challenging to a user to remember, what game was and where to go to download it, and the most crucial part is that you can’t measure the effectiveness on one single campaign.

All of this raises the question of how to optimize your digital marketing campaign effectively.

We recommend the following:

First, leverage cost-effective platforms/media to promote your game.

Here are some non-expensive platforms/media you probably know and use every day:

• Snapchat
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Twitter
• TikTok
• IM (Signal, Telegram, FB messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, etc)
• SMS
• Email
• Communities (Discord)
• Websites
• Reddit

Now imagine that you have a post on one of these tools (Twitter for example), and as you know, you have only 150 Characters as a limit but you want to talk about your game and share the link to the game.   You have a problem, and here are the options:

1. Share the link for android in one post and send another post for iOS users (Not elegant but not so great, perhaps the link number of characters will consume your 150 Char limit)
2. Share the info of your game and add the link to your website (if you have one)
3. Pay for two Ads on Twitter locked to specific platforms, which will cost you twice the effort and increase your budget, but you can see some practical results.
4. Share your game’s info and have a universal smart link in your post that will redirect visitors to the proper app store to effectively download your game!

On Instagram, for example, you can’t add links yet within the post, but you can tell your followers/audience to visit your profile link.

In this case, you can’t have two links in your profile.

A solution is to use a universal smart link in your profile and indicate the audience to download your game there.

So far, the two examples above rely on universal links, but what is a universal link?

Universal links are single links for multiple-platforms games or apps that detect the user platform providing a view of the user-platform store listing.

Universal links will help you optimize your marketing expending and increases the likelihood of downloading your game.

As a developer, we have faced these issues multiple times, and at our studio, TAPQUAD, we decided to do something about it. We developed the 1Link App.

1Link ™ is a platform that help you create universal links for games and apps.

Our Links offer Portability, security, and data analytics, providing insights into the performance of the awareness on each platform.

Here is a comparison of how the 1Link App compares to other look-a-like services.

Comparison table: Competitors offer some kind of similar basic universal link functionality.

The IGDA community is invited to use the 1Link App, starting with fifty (50) developer members to create the one universal link for free for their game.

How to Redeem the Offer:

1. Download 1Link app on your mobile device, iPhone, iPad, Android phone using this link: https://1link.app
2. Create an Account in the App.
3. DO NOT purchase the subscription.
4. Email support@1link.app the user name and email used when creating the member number of IGDA. (This is just to validate that are coming from IGDA, unless you have a different approach)