Project Overview
Boardroom Tycoon allows players to build a company from the ground up, competing in real-time against real players to hire and fire staff, complete deals, attempt takeovers and acquire income-generating assets to build up their share price and battle for a place at the top of the leader board.
With players from around the world, your company is never safe - when you are sleeping, someone else is sitting on the train on the other side of the world launching a takeover against you and lowering your share price! Money never sleeps.
Organisation
Team
Craig Laughton - Executive Producer / Concept Design / Audio
Ezra Clough - Producer / Lead FAPP Designer / Audio
David Sauer - Producer / Copywriter
Nathan Murphy (Subliminal Software) - Programming
Catherine Rendell/Clive Hambly (Dextrous Design) - Art
Luc Le Quiniat - Concept Design
Lisa Carroll - Concept Design
Jillian Bowen - Concept Design / Social Media
Project Brief
This was corporate black ops. Boardroom Tycoon (codenamed Project X) was never meant to happen. Meetings were held in secret and information was on a need to know basis only. This is not the type of thing companies in our field do.
How do you capture the hyper tension of a real life corporate takeover? By making players personally invested in their own virtual business. We wanted to create a game where players all over the world could create business empires and then take each other over in epic business battles. In this game, there is a genuine possibility you will lose everything.
The game had to balance the serious side of managing costs, staff and assets, with the fun side of trying to beat other players in corporate raids - taking their money, staff and cash value of their assets. Behind the chaos, we needed to encourage learning of real life business concepts and follow our corporate mantra of developing future business leaders.
Project Need
Boardroom Tycoon is the world's first business themed massively multilayer online game (MMO) produced by a professional financial organisation.
It redefines the way in which professional organisations engage with their target demographic, and future potential candidates.
Already we have seen unprecedented engagement with players averaging upwards of 16 minutes in game per day. In terms of content produced by a professional financial organisation, this level of engagement is off the charts. Boardroom Tycoon gives us a vehicle to promote the CPA Australia brand in an enjoyable way.
Boardroom Tycoon is an adaptable platform that appeals to players of all ages and at all stages of their careers. Boardroom Tycoon puts players against each other from around the world, ranging from students to business leaders.
Outside titles do not matter, as in the world of Boardroom Tycoon, everyone is a CEO.
User Experience
What would you do if someone gave you $50 million to start a business? Players of Boardroom Tycoon are given the opportunity to build their own business empire.
As a budding CEO you must choose:
Which businesses to takeover
Which deals to make
Who to hire or fire
Which assets to invest in
Who to ally with
Who to lend money to
How to grow your share price
How to reach the top of the leader board
Any successful player of Boardroom Tycoon must become proficient in making good business decisions. By making these decisions the player becomes personally invested in the business they've created. When people care about their company, they care about what happens to it. So when someone smashes you and lowers your share price - your new goal in life becomes smashing them back. It's this competitiveness which promotes engagement. It's also what caused more noise in our office than our new coffee machine.
A lot of thought went into what was needed to achieve true user engagement. We played the game non stop between ourselves, against school kids, uni students, programmed bots and then the rest of our company.
We were conscious that each time a player returns is another opportunity for them to be exposed to the CPA Australia brand.
Project Marketing
Our strategy has been to achieve a critical mass of user engagement before executing a mass marketing campaign.
We have seeded the game in universities, through our on campus business development resources, lecturers holding competitions with their classes (we'll be presenting an award to the winner of the University of Tasmania challenge next month), primary schools through live testing/feedback sessions and professional networks through LinkedIn and CPA Australia's magazine INTHEBLACK.
Social media has also been targeted through burst Facebook and Twitter campaigns. Organic traffic has also been a major part of our success in achieving 160,000 downloads.
Project Privacy
To avoid privacy issues, players are not required to enter any personal information (such as email addresses, Facebook information etc) to login and/or play Boardroom Tycoon. You can play Boardroom Tycoon completely anonymously.
Games
This category relates to games including Action & Adventure, sport simulation, educational, board, card and dice developed for the mobile platform.
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