If you’ve ever played a mobile game to while away the time, you know how a lot of them work – you play to earn points or coins, that you can redeem for features that will make it easier to earn more points or coins, to redeem for even more features. It’s an endless loop that somehow keeps you hooked.
Lately, though, more mobile games are being played for real-world rewards. And in some cases, those rewards can come in the form of coupons.
Weigel’s is a convenience store chain with more than 80 locations in eastern Tennessee. Like many convenience store chains around the country, it has an app and a rewards program. But it also now has a full selection of in-app mobile games that customers can play to save on their next Weigel’s purchase.
After a couple of months of testing, the retailer has officially unveiled Weigel’s Arcade, in partnership with its app developer Rovertown. While many retailers have offered one-off games in their apps, Weigel’s Arcade features a rotating selection of dozens of mobile games that Rovertown offers. App users can play the games to earn coins that can be redeemed in the “Coin Catalog” for coupons.
The rewards aren’t cheap – the Coin Catalog currently features a selection of coupons including 25 cents off an energy drink, 50 cents off a pack of Reese’s peanut butter cups and $1 off KIND snacks, each of which will cost you 10,000 coins. By playing games (badly), the bare minimum you can earn per day is a few hundred coins. So you either have to be very determined, or very good at the games, to save up enough to redeem for coupons.
But then keeping you coming back to play more and earn more, is the whole point.
“The Weigel’s Arcade offers an innovative way to engage our customers, making their experience with our app even more rewarding,” Weigel’s Director of Loyalty Jessica Starnes said in a statement. “By combining entertainment with our loyalty program, we’re creating a unique, family-friendly platform that strengthens our connection with the communities we serve.”
Weigel’s is the inaugural client of what Rovertown is calling “Game Room,” which it describes as “the most ambitious use of mobile gaming to date in convenience retailing.” You may only visit a convenience store every once in a while, if you need a quick snack, or after filling up your gas tank. So the store’s app is often out of sight, out of mind. But Rovertown says Game Room is “designed to turn app engagement into a daily habit.”
“When customers open your app every day to play and earn their daily rewards, they’re thinking about your brand constantly. That’s the kind of engagement every retailer wants,” Rovertown president and co-founder Jeffry Harrison said in a statement. “As both a mobile gamer and a former retailer, I know how powerful gaming can be for engagement,” Rovertown’s head of strategy and analytics Tyler Cameron added. “Gaming has already won the battle for attention. Now, retailers finally have a new way to compete.”
Combining game-playing and real-world rewards is not a new concept. The Fetch rewards app recently, and somewhat controversially, added gaming to its core receipt-scanning functionality, giving users the chance to earn points redeemable for gift cards if they download and play mobile games. Some users objected to the requirement that they agree to be tracked when they download and play the games, while others suggested Fetch was straying from its mission of rewarding you for shopping, by diversifying into gaming. But Fetch is happy with what it’s seen – more than 5 million users have downloaded games and have earned more than 55 billion additional Fetch points, leading Fetch to declare the feature a “wildly popular addition” to its app.
Still, grafting a gaming feature onto a shopping rewards app was a risk, in that playing mobile games and buying groceries don’t necessarily mix. Rovertown’s Game Room is designed to make that combination more seamless. Its games are hosted within its retail partners’ apps – no separate downloads or tracking required. And the points you earn aren’t just deposited into a bank where you can save up for a gift card to another retailer – the rewards you earn in a store like Weigel’s app, can be redeemed for rewards in a Weigel’s store. The more you use the app to play, the more you can use it to save.
Weigel’s says its games have helped increase the average time spent on the app by 15.6%. “The results speak for themselves,” Starnes said. “We’re excited to continue exploring how we can use this to drive deeper engagement with our customers.”
So if you’ve grown tired of the endless loop, of playing a mobile game to earn points to redeem for ways to keep you playing that game to earn even more points, then integrating games into your local convenience store’s app may be just what you’re looking for. The coupons are waiting – and those 10,000 coins aren’t going to earn themselves.
Image source: Rovertown
