DevHub TURNS WEBSITE BUILDING INTO A SERIOUSLY FUN GAME

Market Wire, July, 2010

EVO Media Group, Inc. has announced the launch of its ‘gamified’ version of DevHub ( www.devhub.com ), a popular website building platform. By turning the process into a game, DevHub now makes it fun, engaging, and rewarding for users to build useful, money-generating websites.

DevHub creator and EVO Media Group CEO Geoffrey Nuval explains, “Millions of people are hooked doing nothing online; they spend hours of their day playing games on sites like Facebook to grow virtual crops or recruit a click mafia. What if all those hours of play were actually spent creating something of value, while still entertaining you? That is what DevHub offers its users. You can play through it for just a few minutes a day and when you’re finished, you know you’ve contributed to something tangible — your own website — an asset online that you can point your friends to, refer customers to, or make money from. Imagine that… a game that pays you to play.”

So how does DevHub work? You first start out choosing a game track, which builds a specific type of website. Current options include a small business site, a blog, a hub to place all your Web assets, or a site to promote products. Previous bloggers can even import their old blogs from other platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad. After selecting a track, you are then placed into the editor wherein the DevHub game kicks into full gear. A Site Guide greets and leads you through the creation process in the editor, giving you Experience Points and DevHub Coins for the tasks you accomplish. These DevHub Coins are later redeemable for tools, templates, and merchandise in a Marketplace. Players can also earn Devatars, the resident characters of DevHub, by completing certain tasks in the game or by discovering certain secret clues online (such as this article… keep reading!).

To help users better conceptualize the entire site-building process, websites are represented in the game as actual buildings that progressively grow or decay and are populated by the Devatars. As players continue through the game and their buildings level up, they are actually creating sites online that have the potential to earn real money. To make this cash, users are guided by the system to create unique, useful content and then to integrate ads, products, and other offers provided by DevHub partners such as Amazon, Shopping.com, Priceline, and Superpages
making money online