Featured Game XML – Useful Tool from Big Fish Games

I think the tool like Featured Games XML is well-familiar for most partners of Big Fish Games’ Affiliate Program. Recently this very tool has become even more useful for web-masters, allowing them to create pretty fetching promo blocks of “best exclusive” games on their sites.

This type of block lets you mark out the best content among the mass of all modern games, and makes the searching of top-rated and high-quality games much more effective. As you can see, it increases the chance of a new purchase, and as a result you will have more customers that will bring you benefits during the whole year and increase your earnings.

If you haven’t dealt with this tool yet, we would like to add that Featured Games XML is a special XML-feed containing 5 best exclusive games which are offered according to Affiliate Program terms. According to Big Fish Games managers’ words, this type of XML involves only the bestseller games. News feed of the Affiliate Program runs on information that “these games are handpicked by us because we know from experience that they sell well”. There is a ring of truth about it as the use of Featured Games XML during several moths shows that visitors prefer to play and purchase the games chosen by Big Fish Games.

You can find the link to your Featured Games XML at your control panel board, Tools > XML. Today this tool is available for all 10 Content-Languages offered by Big Fish Games Affiliate Program. You can get the hot list of bestseller games for PC or MacOS. This XML-feed is updated everyday at 1AM – PST.

As we have already mentioned, Featured Games XML has become much more useful. Now each featured game has a big flash-banner (<hasdwfeature>yes</hasdwfeature>). Links to swf-files of these flash-banners are built by the following template:

http://games.bigfishgames.com/{foldername}/{assetname}_{dwwidth}x{dwheight}.swf

N.B! The {assetname} element can be derived by parsing {foldername} and stripping off the locale and underscore. So if foldername=”en_yard-sale-hidden-treasures-sunnyville”, then assetname=”yard-sale-hidden-treasures-sunnyville”.

By the way, if you don’t like these flash-banners, you can use big promo-pictures instead, which are also available when a game has <hasdwfeature>yes</hasdwfeature>. Links to these promo-pictures are built by the following template:

http://games.bigfishgames.com/{foldername}/{assetname}_{dwwidth}x{dwheight}.jpg

You can find more useful information about different XML-feeds of Big Fish Games Affiliate Program in the Web Services Documentation.

Thus, Big Fish Games gives us a really great tool but its effectiveness depends of our knowledge, experience and enthusiasm. To our mind, the best example of Featured Games XML usage is shown on the main page of BigFishGames. Of course, the developing of this type of promo-block requires some programming skills. Probably you will invent something new and easier.