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[Muz]

A friend has this idea about building a location based RPG game. Right now, he's building a prototype where the players punch in a SMS to collect points and resources when they get to a certain store. Then you redeem those points for stuff.

You could give your opinions on his idea here:
http://bitly.com/zephyrASU

(It's designed for Malaysian audience, though the guy thinks in English by default.)


But I think this idea has a lot more potential than winning and redeeming points. Here's my take on the idea...

Take inspiration off Zombies, Run!

Business model: Target players and retail outlets. The retail outlets place ads in the game. The players don't have to pay anything, they just log into the locations to redeem virtual world prizes.

The idea is just that you get people to visit a location. I don't think you actually have to make buying things mandatory, because if people went all the way to a restaurant, chances are decent that they'd stop and eat.


So let's take a DF theme.

You could maybe gather resources at different shops. Like go to a gym to level up, a supermarket/grocery for food resources, tool store for building resources. Every now and then there are missions, which require someone visiting the location to complete; these are really just sponsored promotions.

You choose a common location as your "fort". Could be a mall or favorite petrol station. The more people visit it, the more upgrades it has.

There will be PvE, so every now and then you get a siege. Or you could take the initiative and do a mission.

When you do a mission, there might be loot drops, based on the bid placed by the outlet owner. So if the outlet paid $0.50 for an ad, there might be a few crossbow bolts lying around. $3 might net an iron sword as loot. So it implements kind of a bidding system.

There might even be PvP, so you can 'raid' someone else by going to their "fort", even establish politics and alliances in your city. Idk if this is a good thing when real world locations are involved.

So, anyone think this could work? Or do you have a better idea for implementing a real world location-based RPG?

[Scoops Novel]

Could swear this has been done and there's an RPS article on one of them, but can't find it. Probably not in Malaysia though. Best of luck!

[Muz]

Doesn't really matter whether it's been done. Two people can have the exact same idea and implement it completely different. If anyone gets that article let me know

[Retropunch]

It's an interesting premise, but I'm really not sure how well it'd catch on for retail. I mean, I couldn't ever imagine going all the way to a store just to complete a mission. Even if I was REALLY into it, I'd probably just go to the store, get the completion and leave.

I mean, I get gamification and I think it does work for a lot of things, but this is just basically hoping that people care THAT MUCH about gamification that they'll download something which is basically just loads of adverts.