Hotel heiress and party girl Paris Hilton might have walked out of jail early this morning a free woman, but it’s no secret that her three-week stint in the slammer gave news crews, gossip hounds, and time wasters plenty to obsess over.
Not surprisingly, the incarceration and subsequent media frenzy turned into a boon for game makers as well. Web sites like GSN.com and AddictingGames.com jumped into the fray early with free satirical web games that have attracted millions of players.
On Tuesday GSN unveiled The Prison Life 2: Full Release, a free web-based game in which players guide the socialite as she stamps out T-shirts with slogans including “Saur Puss,” “Photo Op,” and “Caged Woman.” The game is a sequel to The Prison Life: Paris, which GSN said has been played more than 1 million times since its release a few weeks ago.
The company hopes the games—often called newsgames because of their relevance to current events—will continue to bring users to its site, where they can play additional games like the television tie-in Lingo or pay to participate in skill-based games such as Dynomite.
AddictingGames, meanwhile, offers its own suite of satirical games, including Dress Paris in Jail and Escape Paris. The site served up more than 1 million plays of Paris-related games last week alone, said Shockwave and AddictingGames Senior Vice President and General Manager Dave Williams. “Newsgames are a great way to get people to come to the site in the first place. They get passed around like crazy,” Mr. Williams said.
Fans of the games can share their favorites quickly via email or by embedding them on blogs or social networking sites. On Monday, AddictingGames formally launched a Facebook application for playing and sharing games.
In September, AddictingGames launched a specific section devoted to newsgames (see Atom Builds Games around News).
While their production values and aesthetics might pale in comparison to those of big-budget whoppers like Gears of War or even casual games such as Heavy Weapon, newsgames can be extremely effective at doing just what their makers intended: bringing millions of eyeballs to sites that generate revenue primarily through advertising.
Expect them to work as marketing tools for the time being. Mr. Williams said the traffic to popular newsgames can put them in the top 10 percent of all games on his site, but such numbers can also decline quickly as user interest fades.
It’s all about being hot, as Ms. Hilton might say.