The fame game: why celebrities including Nicki Minaj are launching their own game apps

Bottling a perfume used to top the hierarchy of celebrity endorsements. Lend your name to a Debenhams collection? Fine, but everyone knows you didn’t design it. Do a voiceover for a loo roll? Selling out for the endless supply isn’t the worst way to flog your soul but it cheapens the brand.
But a perfume felt personal: smell is intimate, and even if the celeb in question had nothing to do with the aroma the branding felt coherent, like they’d bottled their essence and made it available to you in time for the Christmas rush. They had signed off on a word that best captured their spirit and only coincidentally sounded like it might also be a regional nightclub (Zest, Mystery, Exotica, etc).
But perfume is now passé. Who needs to smell nice when they could be using their phone — the average user now checks theirs 110 times a day. And celebrities aren’t rich, famous and powerful for nothing: they innovate. The celebrity game app is the new celebrity perfume.
Nicki Minaj is the latest celebrity to announce that she’ll be launching a game, with Glu Mobile, the same company that brought you Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Before you scoff, in its first five months Kardashian’s app was installed 22,857,239 times, and it made £27.8 million in the third quarter of last year. The concept is so meta — create a celebrity out of nowhere and try to make her the biggest star in the world — that it neatly corroborates the growing suspicion that Kim is the one having the biggest laugh of us all.
A statement from the brand indicated that Minaj’s game will involve “her likeness, voice and creative attention”.  Glu is on a celebrity acquisition mission (presumably that it hopes to convert into a user acquisition pay-off). It is launching another with actor Jason Statham — Sniper X: Kill Confirmed sounds like it could be one of his movies. It also announced that Katy Perry would be launching a game in the “second half” of 2015 — it’s part of a five-year deal and will involve a “digital playground of global success and talent”.

Weatherbeaten adventurer Bear Gryll has got one: on Survival Run, you must flee a grizzly bear that just won’t quit chasing you. The turf is treacherous, and the cub smarter than your average bear. With each success you’ll unlock equipment - including choppers, paragliders and jetpacks - and you can earn coins and food. Obviously, it’s the sort of foraged fare favoured by Grylls on his adventures in the wild.
Snoop Dogg’s in the game too: he launched Way of the Dogg, created with studio 505 Games and developer Echo Peak, last year. It’s a combat game set to his music — really — that was inspired by Snoop’s love of old school Kung Fu films. Every level involves a new fight, set to a new song; Snoop pops up in Temple Tutorials. He’s also popped up with a cameo in True Crime: Streets of LA, as an unlockable character with a mission and his own car.

Source:http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/why-celebrities-including-nicki-minaj-are-launching-their-own-game-apps-a2488471.html