Tuesday, June 9, 2009

POGO.com

When you're unemployed, as I currently am, you tend to have lots of time on your hands to explore the world around you. Some do some soul searching for what it is they want to do next in life. Some get around to reading the books that they previously didn't have time to, the ones lying in corners covered with inches of dust. Then, there are people like me, who fortunately have a degree of financial freedom to check out the latest time-wasting diversions. I have to say, in all my years, I've never fancied myself as a pitchman, but I am truly loving POGO.com.

POGO is something I learned about via a random television commercial, and at first I approached it thinking it to be a clone or carbon copy of PopCap. To my surprise, it's actually unique in its own right. Where PopCap has you playing web-based games just for the sake of playing, POGO tends to make it a little more worthwhile by offering players the chance to win jackpots in grand Las Vegas style.

The business model of POGO seems to be a bit derivative of MySurvey.com, where users take surveys to earn points that they can later redeem for raffle tickets or prizes. POGO players create an account to begin, and each game awards varying amounts of tokens depending on performance and scoring. The chance to win lots of tokens and instant cash really adds a sexy, addictive quality to plain board games such as Scrabble, Monopoly and Yahtzee.

So who's behind this funky, relatively new website? None other than Electronic Arts, or EA! No doubt some savvy gaming minds conceptualized POGO as a competitor to PopCap. What's more, EA's advertising department is able to bring in some significant revenue from major players such as McDonald's and Nissan. Just recently, to promote its McCafe line of coffee, McDonald's awarded each player 3,000 tokens just for logging on.

If you're into web gaming, I definitely encourage you to check out all of the fun stuff that's out there on POGO.com. Just don't forget to take a break and come back to check out what's up here on the Chuckwagon blog!

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