Browser game popularity collapses; Dev costs equal £16 for each registered user
The UK Department for Transport had spent £2.8 million on a road safety awareness game that has flat-lined in popularity for months, new data suggests.
Browser game Code of Everand was built to encourage better road safety standards among young people.
But the Transport Department had to wait two years for the project to launch, and had to fund further development for another two years.
Internal documents show the final bill, for over four years of development, stands at £2,785,695.
A Freedom Of Information request on the data, lodged by blogger Simon Dickson, shows that US studio Area/Code was paid annual sums over four years.
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Google Analytic data shows the game’s popularity peaked in March last year, with some 54,000 registrations made that month. Since then its popularity appears to have fallen dramatically; down to 6,500 registrations in April 2010 and now, nine months later, has flat-lined to some 2,000 registrations per month.
The game’s total 170,000 registered users represents a cost of over £16 for each player.
Code of Everand’s has failed to make an impact on social networks too, with under 600 friends on Facebook and just over 82 followers on Twitter.
I can't decide what I'm more shocked about: how much a *webgame* cost to develop or the fact the UK gov gave it to a US supplier.
Dan Hon pointed out to me that £2.7m was the total budget. Given that this was a marketing budget, overseen by media agency Carat, it probably had a substantial media budget (it's entirely possible that the majority of the spend was on media, not development).
Think! has generally been a successful campaign historically, driven heavily by marketing. I imagine that's the thinking here.
But given to a US dev does seem surprising.
I can't say that the amount spent on the game is shocking for the Government. In fact, given how much has been learned recently about the amounts wasted on other Government projects (in general) that didn't even see the light of day that amount seems positively a bargain.
But they had a US company develop the game!?
Is there a single Dev in the UK that even knew about this project? I doubt it. With all of the rhetoric and discussion and counter discussion that was going on at the time that the project must have started relating to UK tax breaks and the need to support our own industries and interests, the UK Government awarding the project to a US developer is nothing short of a slap in the face for UK Dev.
Things like this make me want to pack up and emigrate to a country that appreciates the talent and potential of it's businesses.
@CD "Things like this make me want to pack up and emigrate to a country that appreciates the talent and potential of it's businesses."
Bye then, Cheerio!
Is this worldwide traffic? The dept of Transports remit would be to reach out to UK users and if this data is worldwide then it is way over estimating the amount of UK users reached. I think we are actually looking at 10k users at the max which puts the spend at closer to £250 per user.
In order to now the real ROI that the DoT got from this we need to know how many of these users were UK based (my experience would suggest about 10%) and then how many of those users would be of school age.
