Hands-On preparing cross-promotion for Icy Tower

Ten million web gamers can't be wrong, but how do you make them aware there's a mobile version of their favourite download?

That's the task Hands-On Mobile is facing with its upcoming Icy Tower game, which was announced this week. The original has racked up ten million downloads and counting, but that doesn't automatically translate into mobile sales.

James Kaye, Hands-On's director of marketing for Europe, South East Asia and Latin America, says the publisher is pulling out all the stops.

"We've worked really closely with Xendex, who developed the game, and Free Lunch Design, who own the IP, to try and get to as much of the existing community as possible," says Kaye.

Hands-On has already set up a dedicated website for the mobile game, whose URL will be promoted in the online version of Icy Tower.

Meanwhile, the publisher is also sending out an HTML newsletter to the game's existing fanbase, and has ad banners running on the official fansite.

"We can already tell that the community have seen it, because they've been commenting on the YouTube video within hours of it going up," says Kaye.

"We're also capturing customer data at the mobile game's site so that we can let fans know when the demo will be available, which they will then be able to request via an international long number."

This is part of Hands-On's efforts to convince operators to give Icy Tower prominent positioning on their decks (crucial if the game is to appeal outside its existing fans).

Pushing out the demo that will in turn drive users to deep links on their operator portals to buy the full game is effective marketing, according to Kaye. "It's really B2C2B marketing!" he quips.

"It's quite a lot of work to get the operators to give you a deep link [to their portals] each, but it means they are happy we are pushing consumers back to them via our marketing activity. We have also done this for the upcoming launches of The Incredible Hulk and Guitar Hero III Mobile.

Kaye says the nature of Icy Tower means it hasn't been hard to reproduce its graphics on mobile, but that Hands-On has worked hard with Xendex on a new control method to replace the mouse UI of the original.

Otherwise, though, the game is similar across both platforms. "Sometimes less is more," says Kaye. "Just because something changes platforms, that doesn't mean we need to mess with the purity of the gaming experience by adding loads of bells and whistles, if it's not really necessary."