500,000 download new Who game

Half a million consumers downloaded Doctor Who: The Adventure Games in its first two weeks.

The free downloadable game was the first of its kind from the BBC, and the broadcaster hopes its success will inspire the games and TV industries to work closer together.

The result is a lot more than I was expecting,” Simon Nelson, controller of portfolio and multiplatform at BBC Vision told MCV.

We had set ourselves some fairly stretched targets on this and we’ve blown them away.

The credit goes to the Doctor Who and marketing teams, who are among the best in the BBC at creating integrated campaigns, messages and interactive spin-offs. This has been part of the Who planning process rather than just a bolt on at the end, which too many interactive things have been.

I’m hoping that we have demonstrated to the TV and the games side that there is a marriage worth pursuing here. There have been many frustrated attempts to bring TV and games together before. And I won’t say that this is the final article, but I like to think we’ve broken ground for the TV industry, games industry, the public service sector and hopefully even the commercial sector, too.”

Despite the initial success, the BBC is not resting on its laurels and is focused on making sure the rest of The Adventure Games are a success before looking ahead to future projects.

We are not complacent here and there’s plenty we can be doing to drive awareness,” continued Nelson. It is a dilemma for anyone doing original web stuff because it is such a crowded environment.

We will be reviewing this pretty hard. We are not short of ideas, but we will be picking them very carefully.

Crucially, the industry and the audience have felt we have created something different here that works. That’s probably more important than the numbers.”