Location-based game SCVNGR is continuing to ramp up its efforts to appeal to local businesses, larger brands, and universities. Since June SCVNGR has offered profiles to normal users (in other words, consumers), where you can see the challenges you’ve recently completed, the badges you’ve earned, and so on. But up until now businesses that offered SCVNGR challenges haven’t had a presence on the game’s website. Today, SCVNGR is looking to help change that.
In short, SCVNGR is launching a feature analogous to Facebook Pages, which allow businesses, brands, and other organizations to set up their own profiles. But SCVNGR isn’t actually calling these business profiles — instead, they’re being called Builder Profiles, because anyone (not just businesses) can build a SCVNGR challenge, and the company wants to make sure the best challenge builders get their share of the spotlight. Still, it’s clear that this feature was built with the businesses in mind.
Visit a Builder Profile, and you’ll see the top challenges and rewards that have been completed there, as well as the total number of times users have engaged with the challenges. CEO Seth Priebatsch says that some businesses have already developed a sort of competition with each other, as they want to be able to show that they’ve had the most engagement.
They look nice, but Builder Profiles have a long way to go, primarily because they don’t have much functionality at this point. Unlike Facebook Pages, which allow businesses to message users who have ‘Liked’ them, Builder Profiles on SCVNGR don’t currently have the ability to message their fans (Priebatsch says that SCVNGR is working out exactly what it wants to do here). Likewise, while you can earn points for creating challenges, they currently aren’t worth anything.
There also seems to be a lot of untapped potential here around the challenges themselves — at this point a challenge is simply listed by name with a brief description, but if SCVNGR continues to gain traction I could see businesses paying for finely-crafted challenges made by other users.
In addition to the launch of the Builder profiles, SCVNGR is also launching a major partnership that marks its biggest deal with a retailer to date: GameStop will begin promoting SCVNGR at each of its 6,000 locations. The partnership is going to initially revolve around the launch the latest title in the massively popular Call of Duty series, called Call of Duty: Black Ops, but Priebatsch sounds confident that GameStop will continue to leverage SCVNGR in future promotional campaigns. SCVNGR also recently landed a deal with the Celtics.
