Alohomora! Indianapolis based Dream Authentics locks up Harry Potter license

“Its new to me”, as NBC pitched it’s sitcom reruns. I heard over the weekend about a local company that makes custom arcade game cabinets (read aggregated emulator package) Dream Authentics landed a license to produce Harry Potter ‘pinhedz’. While not at all arcade related beyond the product division relation to the parent ‘DreamTrust Corp.’ I was happy to hear this news.

Dream Authentics custom arcade cabinets are in a tough business

Interested to read more about the Harry Potter license for wall decorations? Check out the original story about the custom arcade game maker on Indystar.com. I’m done talking about that.

Custom arcade game cabinets is a hard business segment. It would be fulfilling to be in that line of work, but selling the games can be tough. I see now on the re-designed, and much more user friendly DreamAuthentics.com website they make you really hunt for the prices of their gaming cabinets. At a price point of $3,000-$5,000 they certainly don’t sell in bulk. I know that some of Rick Barreto’s ideas have included selling the cabinets as corporate incentives with that custom branding. That can be a tough sell, it’s a pretty specific audience that wants to have a large gaming cabinet in their basement.

Their demographic is certainly the affluent, savvy consumer, most likely male, with an income of $100,000 annually or more. To broadly label that, we’re talking doctors and lawyers certainly. How do you reach those guys? A personal setting is more likely because free time can be hard to find for those individuals. A convention, an after hours events, etc. where the focus is relaxation, and what better for relaxing than giving your Mortal Kombat friend a fatality, stomping some goombas, or feverishly working the flippers on a multiball.

I would guess that any individual purchasing items for a gameroom want to know just enough to make an informed purchase, and they want a knowledgeable, competitive service partner that can fix the machine if needed and suggest additional gameroom items.

Custom arcade cabinet search terms

Looking at Dream Authentics keywords they look like they have no clue what they are doing in the way of search engine optimization. It doesn’t even look like they’ve translated their business demographic into the search terms. Here are the first couple;

1. play arcade games
2. guitar hero
3. play free arcade games
4. arcade fire
5. guitar hero 2

Dream Authentics doesn’t rank in the first page for any of those searches in Google. I mean, ‘Guitar Hero’ alone by itself is pretty ambitious. It feels like an afterthought, like those of us with our first website who just throw together some terms when we don’t really understand a strategy.

Whatever the keywords, they should be #1 at least in their drilled down keywords for local search. I would think they would want to optimize for the following terms at least;

1. indianapolis mame
2. indianapolis custom arcade
3. indiana arcade games
4. indiana arcade game cabinet
5. indiana video game cabinet

They do not appear again in the first page in Google for most of these terms, a huge opportunity wasted. They may not want to be thought of as ‘Mame’, but that is also a little bit of a household name, so you had better appear at the top of that search in my opinion. They do appear #4 for the ‘video game cabinet’ term, but so far any modifier keywords with a base for local search turns up little.

Cool to have a local Indianapolis arcade company

I enjoy having a local company that produces custom arcade game cabinets here in the Indianapolis area. They certainly are smart to diversify into software and graphics, and I see they have started to blog about video games cabinets in Indiana , but even that initiative could use some help. Again they are sporatically talking about arcade cabinet parts, as well as games in contemporary media which I would guess would seem irrelevant to their target market.

They should really be talking about the games that their cabinet can play, where someone can try them out, types of cabinet themes showing some more testimonials with cabs in the gamerooms, and how they can be a total partner for custom gamerooms / what products they can offer.

Harry Potter cash cow for arcade company

I’m glad they’ll have that revenue stream and can stick around long enough to figure out how to better utilize their web presence. With a down economy, now would seem to be the best time to position themselves in a market that seems to be clueless about online marketing. But hey, maybe they don’t need to be in front of that lawyer who is browsing online late after the rest of the family is asleep.

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