DPG Media brings readers back every day with Raad de Stad, a game made only for its titles

A game nobody else has

News sites compete for the same readers, and many of them offer the same puzzles. A crossword or a sudoku that readers can find on any site doesn't give them a reason to come back to one site in particular.

DPG Media wanted a game that belongs to its titles: something readers can only play there, made for a Dutch audience, quick enough for a phone and new every day.

What Playgent made for DPG Media

Playgent created Raad de Stad, Dutch for Guess the City:

• A city from above. Each day starts with a satellite view of a city. Readers can switch between zoom levels for a wider view until they recognize it.
• One city a day. Every reader gets the same city, and a new one arrives tomorrow.
• Streaks and statistics. Readers see their current and longest streaks and how they've played over time.
• In Dutch. Every screen, button and message is written in Dutch.

The game was made for DPG Media alone. Its cities, its language and its look were chosen for DPG Media's readers, and it runs only on DPG Media's titles.

A reason to come back every day

A daily game works because it ends. Readers get one city and a few guesses to name it, then they wait for tomorrow. A streak turns that into a habit: a reader who has guessed ten days in a row doesn't want to miss the eleventh.

Every return is a visit to NU.nl or another DPG Media title, not to a games site somewhere else. The game brings readers back to the news.

Why DPG Media chose Playgent

An exclusive game usually means a custom project: design, development, hosting, a schedule of content and someone to keep it running. Playgent took all of it on. It designed and built Raad de Stad, picks a city for every day and runs the game day to day.

The same game runs on several DPG Media titles from one setup, and analytics show how many readers play and finish on each site.

What's ahead for DPG Media

Raad de Stad shows what a game made for one publisher can do, and the same approach works for other ideas: a game around a national event, a region or a season. With Playgent Studio, DPG Media's teams can create new games by chatting with AI, and Playgent's catalog of more than 60 games is there for anything that doesn't need to be exclusive.

If you run news brands and want a game your readers can only play with you, talk to our team.