To launch the updated version of Monopoly, board game company Hasbro made it playable online, using Google Maps.
‘Monopoly City Streets’ has been positioned as ‘a property empire building game on an unimaginable scale….turning the globe into one giant game board in a bid to uncover the greatest property magnate the world has ever known’. You start with 3 million Monopoly dollars, and can build not only hotels and houses but also football stadiums, castles and skyscrapers in a game that you play against the rest of the online world.
The game is accompanied by an official blog, managed by ‘Mr Monopoly’, which was used to drive excitement pre-launch and is now being used to help explain the rules and make announcements. In additional, their very active twitter account (with over 6,000 followers) is busy fielding any questions.
Although there was a backlash last week from irate players complaining about server issues (which crashed as a result of too much traffic), the brand’s existing presence in social media gave them the chance to respond by placing the decision regarding whether the game should be reset once the new hardware was in place, in the hands of the players, via a poll on the blog.
It’s a very ambitious venture, but if the current traffic readings of over 1.7 million unique visitors a day is anything to go by, it’s an idea that works. The activity is rekindling interest in the game and, if enough sales result, we may well see more board games integrating with social media this way.
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