GameFoundry: Social Gaming Platform for Digital Marketing, User Profiling and Collective Behavior

Traditional marketing has been using the Internet as a mean of transport for advertising, usually through the use of banners or sponsored links. However, new tendencies in digital marketing are focusing on added interactivity, where the use of games as a marketing tool is not new. Moreover, the portion of population engaged in social networks is quickly increasing, turning these into preferred targets for marketing actions, considering the potential of retrieving valuable personal, demographic and geographic data. Forwarding recent advances in data mining and knowledge extraction to this model would therefore turn it into a powerful tool to measure the impact of marketing and branding actions, while reinforcing marketing strategy. In this paper we present GameFoundry, a new online platform that aims at creating an innovative Web Game Engine and Game Distribution system, which will provide support for knowledge management and game activity monitoring based on simple network games. It is intended to give the users the possibility of playing games in several environments, platforms and social networks, and to provide the clients of this product the ability to create, independently, a set of games with proprietary contents, distribute them over the network and have constant access to game activity, statistics and advanced user profiling, collective behavior and predictive models.