Before You Pay for a Branded Game: 5 Questions That Decide Whether It Pays Off
The five questions to answer before commissioning a branded game, so you fund footfall and repeat visits instead of a gimmick nobody plays.
Most branded games fail quietly. No bug, no crash, just a screen sitting in a corner while people walk past it. The brand paid for a game. What they actually wanted was for customers to do something. Stay longer, come back, hand over their details, buy the next thing. The game was never the point.
I've built nine of these for hospitality, food, and entertainment brands. The ones that worked, like the arcade cabinet that kept BBT's restaurant customers coming back for three months, got these five questions answered before anyone wrote a line of code. The ones that struggle almost always skipped them.
Answer these honestly and you'll know whether your idea is worth funding, and what it should actually cost. Skip them and you're buying a gamble.
1. What do you want a visitor to do differently?
Not "play a fun game." That's the mechanism, not the outcome. The real question is what behaviour changes because the game exists. Do they stay on-site longer, walk to the counter, scan a product, come back next week, leave you their email?
Every good build starts from one specific behaviour. The Valamar kids' experience existed to keep families on the resort longer. The Jana AR promo existed to turn a water bottle into a reason to engage with the brand. If you can't name the one thing a visitor should do differently, the game has no job. And a game with no job is the gimmick you're afraid of.
2. How will you know it worked?
Once you've named the behaviour, decide how you'll measure it. Plays per day. Dwell time. Redemptions at the till. Repeat scans. Emails captured. Pick the number you'd look at in three months to decide whether this was money well spent.
This matters more than it sounds. A measurable goal changes what gets built. A game designed to drive counter redemptions looks nothing like one built to capture data. And without a number, "did it work?" becomes an argument about opinions instead of a fact you can point to. If no one can say how success will be measured, that's the first thing to fix, before budget.
3. Where will it run all day, unattended, and who keeps it alive?
This is the question that separates a demo from a deployment, and it's the one most people skip. A game that looks great for five minutes at a pitch is a different animal from one that runs eight hours a day, in public, with no one watching it, getting hammered by strangers who press every button at once.
Real installations need an attract loop to pull people in, inputs that survive abuse, and the ability to recover on their own when something goes wrong. On custom hardware, that's most of the engineering. Decide early where it lives, what it runs on, and who's responsible when it freezes on a Saturday night. Because something will, and the plan for that moment is part of the cost.
4. What's the reward loop that pulls them back to the counter?
A high score is forgotten by the time people reach the car park. A reward they can redeem, a discount, a free side, an entry into a draw, turns one play into a second visit and a line item you can actually see in the till.
The game is the hook. The reward is the business case. If the experience doesn't connect to something the visitor wants and something you want them to do, you've built entertainment, not marketing. Design the loop first, play, win, redeem, return, and the game almost designs itself.
5. What is a successful outcome actually worth to you?
Last, and most important. If this delivered the behaviour from question 1, at the scale of the metric in question 2, what is that worth to the business? Three months of repeat footfall, a season of longer family stays, thousands of brand interactions. Put a rough number on it.
I ask because budget should map to value, not to "what does a game cost." A build that returns ten times its cost is cheap at the price. One that returns nothing is expensive at any price. Knowing the value up front is how you avoid overspending on a vanity project and underspending on something that was always going to need more to actually work.
If you can answer these, you're ready
Notice none of these five questions is about technology. They're about outcome, measurement, reliability, return, and value. The things that decide whether a branded game pays for itself. The Unity build, the hardware, the platform, those are the easy part once the answers above are clear.
If you've got answers to most of these, you're in good shape to commission something that works. If a couple are still fuzzy, that's normal. Sorting them out is the first part of the job, and it's the part that saves you the most money.
That's usually where I start with a brand. Not "what game," but "what should the customer do next, and what's that worth to you." If you're weighing a branded game or interactive installation and want to think it through, tell me about your project. I'll help you pressure-test the idea before anyone talks budget.