There's an excellent new article up on GameDaily.biz today examining how effective game websites are at driving sales. In it Scott Meldrum of HypeCouncil (warning - ANNOYING music!) takes a critical look at the websites for Bioshock, Guitar Hero 3 and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

The sites, while in many cases beautiful, come up sorely lacking when it comes to some of the key functions you expect from a major marketing vehicle. There was little call to action for purchase, little or no attempt to create a community around the sites and almost no attention paid to turning your users into Mini-Marketers for the games.

Bummer... but not at all unexpected, to be quite honest.

Where are the feeds for game news? Where is the link to purchase Bioshock digitally? Where is my AIM icon pack? What about keeping people coming back once the game has launched?

Now, The Cult of Rapture does have some awesome goodies but it is so, so hard to find... and doesn't really seem to fit in at all with the big, Flashy main Bioshock site. Could it be that the two were designed by different folks? The Cult by people who "get it" and the main site by people who, quite frankly, don't?

The Guitar Hero 3 site does offer a glimmer of hope with the Backstage Pass but breaks one of my cardinal rules for websites: the dreaded "coming soon." I can almost guarantee you that I'll never come back to see if you finished what you promised.

We're always preaching to developers about how community needs to be a part of game design from day one. It looks like that message needs to be expanded to more forcefully include marketing as a part of the design process.

Command & Conquer 3 was an excellent case study for this approach. We worked very closely with the team at EA LA to get as much of the site up and functional as soon as possible. C&C Online was there to provide a constant stream of information for fans of the game.

There were forums for users to chat with one another, developer blogs on the design process and in-depth podcasts for users to download and listen to again and again. In addition to a wealth of information we gave them a real reason to visit: gamers were allowed to pre-register their nicknames for the retail release.

Perhaps most importantly the site morphed once the game was released. The marketing material was still there for new users but new, live content appeared. Ladders, clans, Battlecast and other features were exposed giving people a real reason to return time and time again.

It pains me to think of all the time and money spent on the ineffective sites Meldum profiled. How much more effective could they have been in driving sales by recognizing and using the simplest of tools the Web has to offer? What more could have been done post-launch to keep users coming back, priming them for the next installment in the franchise...

I saw this weekend that clever folks at Team Ninja are giving gamers an actual, honest-to-God reason to play their demo: free loot. (Thanks, Joystiq.) Players are rewarded with in-game currency based on the length of time they play the demo.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma (PS3)

It struck me that there were a number of other interesting and unique things that a developer could do to put their demos to better use.

Link to Pre-Orders
Why, oh, why, do we still see static "Buy me when i finally come out!" images at the end of game demos? Digital retail is here! Stop asking people to remember that your game will be coming out in the future and start taking their money now.

Interested? Talk to our friends at Direct2Drive about digitally distributing your game and enabling their awesome pre-load functionality in conjunction with your pre-order program. At the very least link to some sort of retail pre-order landing page explaining where you can buy retail.

Reserve Your Nickname
Games that use our Community services have the option of letting their players choose unique nicknames on a per-game basis. Encourage people to "claim" their name by using the same namespace in your demo. (Expire old, unused nicknames at a later date or use our "Naminator" to suggest creative name variants.)

Accumulate Stats from the Demo
We see more and more games featuring leaderboards and stats. Why not combine the demo and retail info into one, unified leaderboard? Let your players jockey for position at the top in the demo and then see if they can maintain that position once the retail game comes out. We're doing this right now with the Ghost Recon 2 (PC) demo on GameSpy Arena.

There are a million other ways to make your demo a more powerful selling tool, I'm sure. When it comes time to assemble the demo resist the urge to slap together a single player level with a static "buy me" image at the end and find one of those million ideas that will work for you.