Escape City tour with more than 169 000 players – Bring your game on! Game presentations around the world series

Games around the world that different event, team building, tour, and adventure companies are running. In “Bring your game on!” video presentation series we will take a look at some of the most intriguing, profitable and fun game products introduced by the companies.

In this presentation Robert-Jan from Escape Tours talks about Escape City tour with more than 169 000 players and how it is run in different countries.
Hero feature of this game: Picture overlay

If you wish to play this game at your event or purchase the concept for your event company, contact: Robert-Jan Thomassen, robertjan@gamifiedconcepts.com
https://en.escape-tours.com/

Transcript

Tags:: us games, escape tour, tablet computer, smartphone, Logo, Testing, Event, presentation, City, The Night, Location, Europe, Number, team, ticket, storyline, Fun

Summary:
The escape to our on a site project, the game that they have built and run and answers all sorts of interesting details about the game. Robertson is the founder and CEO of Escape Tours.

1 Escape Tours – The Company

Tags: Game, Escape, presentation, Tours, Tour, Bring Your Game On with Robertson, City, the Netherlands, Logo, Europe, COVID, Event

00:06 – 00:35

Speaker 1

Hello. We are here today in our new series, Bring Your Game On with Robert-Jan from Escape Tours. And he’s going to present a game which they have built and run and answers all sorts of interesting details about the game. So the floor is yours. Can you tell a little bit about your company and today’s game?

00:37 – 01:06

Speaker 2

Yeah, I will introduce a little bit of our company and how it’s evolved over time, and then I will do a short presentation of the actual game. The game we’re going to talk about is one of the things we do that have developed into kind of its own company now because of the the mass amount of things we do for it and the amount of people that actually book it.

01:06 – 01:53

Speaker 2

And we already did this before COVID hit the world. Up until then, we were busy doing a lot of real life events, which were also for the, I think the last five, six, seven years done with logos. And we had this game that we’re going to talk about today, the escape to our on a site project. And once COVID hit the world, we already had quite some cities where we where we had the games, but then we had all the time and the energy to to expand that and that things have turned into what we have today. And that’s exactly what I’m going to kind of show you now.

01:53 – 02:15

Speaker 2

So I’ll walk you through the presentation and I will. We’ll show you. This one. Here comes. You can see it, I assume.

02:15 – 02:40

Speaker 2

Yeah. It’s called escape tours. And like this first, she says it’s played all around the world, literally. We started off in the Netherlands, where we are based, soon got into Europe, and we’re making games all around the world right now. I will explain a little bit how we do that in a second, but it’s worldwide.

2 What is an escape tour?

Tags: escape tour, us games, smartphone, Game, Logo, City, Amsterdam, tablet computer, Testing, local, Goal, Dutch

02:44 – 03:33

Speaker 2

First off, what is an escape tour? It’s basically a city game where you try to find the secret exit of the city. And the goal that people have is to do it within 2 hours. They can play longer because some teams actually want to bus and sit down for a second or a half an hour. But the goal is it’s playable within 2 hours with a little team, 2 to 5 people, and it says here a smartphone or tablet. But if people start using language, they know preferably a tablet. I don’t know the numbers right now, but I think that like 98% of the games are played with a smartphone, not a tablet, a smartphone. So the same goes for this one. It’s played on the smartphone like pretty much all of us games, of course.

03:34 – 04:29

Speaker 2

Well, how do we do this? I will come back to the the numbers of how we are doing right now. But how do we actually create a game we preferred to visit before we go? That has evolved. When we start doing this, we like spend the whole entire day at a city trying to make a game. Nowadays, we prepare the visit so that we can make it in like 2 to 3 hours, actually being in the city. And after we make the game, we finalize the game and logos. Of course, we do a little bit of testing right now, not as much as we did before, because the whole concept, as you will see, we have made 100 plus cities as we speak. So the whole testing isn’t that really important anymore, but quite know very good what we’re doing.

04:31 – 04:53

Speaker 2

So that’s the basic it doesn’t really look like this on your smartphone, but this is a development picture. So it can show or you can see the entire game is actually is Amsterdam. And the whole idea is, as you can see on the left, that there are levels that you go through.

04:54 – 05:27

Speaker 2

The game itself isn’t really hard. It’s also not very easy. It’s meant for, like we say, average people, no one is really average, but we head for the mass and it has to be fun. It has to have a lot of. Good moments in it where people actually achieve something instead of getting blocked by whatever. And it has. Have to stop the game. This is one part that makes it interesting for us.

05:28 – 06:08

Speaker 2

So Logos is obviously used to play the game, but the whole idea is that people can book it and the whole process is automated. That’s what we do next. And this is how it works. When you actually book it, you choose your city, you book it online. So it’s either on our Dutch website or the international website. You get everything by email, all the information you need, and you can play the game whenever you want. So every game is actually made so that it is possible to play 24/7 also in the middle of the night.

06:10 – 06:50

Speaker 2

Luckily, some last additions to the locals app have made it possible to actually use some locations in the game that are only open for visiting between, let’s say 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.. We can work around that. In the old days that wasn’t possible yet, so we had to do some other things. But nowadays it’s get it’s getting easier and easier to to include locations in the game that aren’t open like in the middle of the night. So it’s a completely automated process.

3 How many cities have they made so far?

Tags: Game, City, Easter, ticket, Europe, storyline, Escape, Loki, Locust

06:52 – 07:29

Speaker 2

Next one. These are the numbers right now. We have. About 130 plus cities made already. And watch. It’s not like every game is the same. That’s important. Every game we make, every city is unique. Most of the cities, especially in Europe, we visit ourselves and outside Europe we have other peoples helping us. So every game is unique. It has a unique storyline and it is also has unique tasks that can only be played at the location because it has to do with the location.

07:30 – 08:14

Speaker 2

And right now we’ve sold more than 50,000 tickets and uh, uh, close to 170,000 people played. That’s where we are right now. And I think this year it, last month in March, it’s, uh, the numbers compared to last year was four times as much. So I, uh, I expect these numbers to go up really fast in the coming months. I think we’re going to go for a 100,000 at least played this year. These numbers are from last year, but they’re going quite well, which makes the goal.

08:15 – 08:40

Speaker 2

I think next year we will have at least 200 cities and I think that at least half a million people have teams have played the game that’s at the end of next year. And I think that’s very reasonable to have another one. No, there was the last one. Oh, they are. So that’s insurance.

08:40 – 09:17

Speaker 2

The game itself isn’t really complicated if you compare it, for example, with the Easter game that Locust has launched last week. Technically, the Easter game is more complicated on the back end than the escape tourists because there is a lot we can use for the escape to is technically spoken, but it’s not really necessary up until now to use all the nifty bits of of Loki’s.

09:21 – 09:52

Speaker 2

So that’s basically this game. It’s not really a complicated game, but it is really a fun game and it’s aimed towards not necessarily business to business, more B to C, but as I said to you before and for example, today we have about 100 teams playing and like 70 to 80% is our business customers that have bought the game themselves for multiple teams.

4 How do they deal with companies booking multiple games at once?

Tags: presentation, Event, ticket

09:54 – 10:02

Speaker 1

Thank you for the presentation. I would like to ask a few extra questions. Sure.

10:02 – 10:02

Speaker 2

Go ahead.

10:03 – 10:16

Speaker 1

I do remember a specific event for a specific brand you made and you kind of feel it was really cool and you got a lot of, like, interesting feedback from the participants.

10:18 – 10:46

Speaker 2

Yeah. Multiple, of course. For example, I can give you an example of today. Actually, we have by coincidence, it is the school of my son that has booked without me knowing it until they put up the schedule. But it’s an example of a school in this case, but it’s also goes for companies that booked like 23 tickets at once and start playing.

10:46 – 11:28

Speaker 2

So it’s we see a lot of companies booking this game with multiple tickets at once and it differs from time to time in the early days. Like, how long are we doing this? Like four years, five years, this game. It was a bit more tricky, of course, but we had a lot of companies doing this, so it’s because it’s fully automated. We don’t always have a direct. Conversation with a client about these games afterwards. We see a lot of fun stuff going on.

5 Do you have a personal favorite task or character in the game?

Tags: storyline, City, Game, Character, Barcelona, local, presentation

11:30 – 11:40

Speaker 1

Do you have a personal favorite task or character in the game or part of the game you would like to talk about?

11:42 – 12:20

Speaker 2

In this case, every city has its own unique storyline. It’s always based on some person that has actually lived there. And we always hope that this person, it’s a famous person, but we also hope that this person has done some things that are a bit on the edge of what’s what shall I say? It’s we always hope they do some stuff that most people don’t do or that would come into the papers if they would live in these years.

12:21 – 12:52

Speaker 2

So pretty much every character is fun to do. But I especially enjoyed making Barcelona because it’s a very nice city for this game to play and the character herself is it was really fun. So personally, if I create an escape to her, I have a lot of fun creating the storyline in in locals and connecting all the storyline to the game itself. So there are multiple, actually.

12:54 – 13:19

Speaker 1

That’s good to hear. But thank you so much for joining us here today. And and I hope you will have a really interesting and cool game season for the spring and summer. So thank you. I look forward to you joining in future presentation, showing other games.

13:19 – 13:29

Speaker 2

Sure. Yeah, we have a lot. I am actually building two right now. So they are really interesting and totally different. Totally different game.

13:32 – 13:36

Speaker 1

Bye bye. And the next time. See you.

13:36 – 13:37

Speaker 2

Yeah, I might.