Influx Insights Tag Feed: gaming

pushing tv into video games

Influx Insights — 2007-11-01T12:15:51Z

There was an interesting story yesterday about BBC's Top Gear teaming up with Polyphony, the creations of the racing video game Gran Turismo. The deal involves Top Gear providing program content for the new Gran Turismo channel (I assume this is part of an extended TV network that Sony Playstation is building) and adding the show's unique test track to the Gran Turismo video game.

The channel will launch some time in 2008.

Clearly, it's an example of TV networks reaching out to ensure their content gets distributed as widely as possible. With certain audiences spending more and more time with video games, the seamless integration of additional content onto gaming platforms makes a great deal of sense, especially given the ability of the consoles to handle HD.

It's probably safe to assume that all kinds of media tie-ups will happen and be integrated into games, especially with the sports franchises sharing highlight reels and the like with their gaming partners.

It also suggests that brands might have the opportunity to generate more interesting content within and with video games than just placing their product in the game.

Posted by Ed Cotton

world cyber games- the challenges of the athlete

Influx Insights — 2007-10-08T15:32:19Z

In case you weren't aware, the World Cyber Games in Seattle just finished this Sunday, it's basically the Olympics of video games with competitions in Warcraft, Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing and more. In these games, contestants represent their countries. The tournament ended with USA on top of the medals table, followed by Brazil and South Korea.

Here's a great interview with Geoff Robinson, a Team USA cyber athlete, who plays Starcraft for his country and claims his biggest challenges are getting his roomate to pay the internet bill and finding six hours a day to practice.

Sadly, the interview is cut a little early, just when Geoff starts to explain how he managed to take advantage of his dad's business trip to travel to a tournament.

Posted by Ed Cotton

world of warcraft is the new surfing

Influx Insights — 2007-08-28T03:40:13Z

So much has been written on the Internets about Blizzard Entertainment's massively multiplayer game, World of Warcraft, that it has acquired the appearance of ubiquity in America. We read that the game has 9 million "subscribers" and that its appearance on South Park puts the finishing touches on the game's march into the American mainstream. Last year, a new meme got started that WoW is the new golf because some set of people use it to network. We thought it might be fun to do an actual comparison between WoW and golf.

Golf is a fairly popular sport in the US, although nowhere near the level of basketball, football, or baseball. There are several estimates floating around out there, but we'll go with 26 million Americans who play golf at least once a year. That's about 8% of the US population, and among certain populations (cough, old white guys) the game's penetration is undoubtedly much higher.

How does WoW stack up to a true mainstream American hobby like golf? There are a lot of bad numbers about how many Americans truly play World of Warcraft. We scarequoted "subscribers" in the lead because it is a stretch of the definition to include Chinese players under that label. Chinese players use prepaid cards that do not recur like a subscription. This is important because the majority of WoW players are Chinese. Blizzard's Chinese partner, the9, stated on May 22nd that over 7.5 million Chinese accounts had been activated, although it's likely that a couple million accounts have lapsed. Because most writers and bloggers aren't digging into the facts, it lends WoW a purported popularity that stretches beyond its factual penetration.

So how many American players are there? Well, the best metric we've got is the number of people who bought the Burning Crusade expansion. Traditionally, expansions have sold to a very high percentage of a user base and very quickly. In its first month on the market, WoW sold about 1.8 million copies for North American regions. Let's assume that 70% of North American subscribers would purchase the expansion within its 1st month on the market. Doing the math, we arrive at about 2.6 million North American subscribers, or less than 1% of the American population.

No one disputes that what World of Warcraft has done is unprecedented in Western markets. WoW has about 5 times as many Western subscribers as any MMOG before it. But it's worth getting the facts right. At times, it has seemed that Internet media have talked up World of Warcraft like a Northeastern prep school newsletter promoting squash (500,000 players) as equivalent to football (18 million players). But let's be intellectually honest. According to the National Golf Foundation, there are more non-white golfers (3.4 million) in the US than total WoW players.

Blogs and other internet media can provide distribution to a wider variety of opinions than are normally expressed in the much-reviled mainstream media. But it's also possible that the echo-chamber effect of the blogosphere ends up promoting an equally narrow set of ideas, the same tired suit merely tailored for a younger, tech savvy audience.

But because I believe in replacing bad ideas with better ideas and I don't want all the Warcraft hordes to crucify me, let me update the golf analogy with a better one. WoW could actually be the new surfing. With a comparable number of American participants (2.8 million surfers), the sport's strangeness and popularity among a cool subset of the American population (young, male, high advertising value) has led it into the mainstream consciousness, if not mainstream usage. While remaining a niche activity (indeed, that's part of its branding), it has spawned a lingo and a fashion and a lifestyle, all of which it could be argued WoW is too. It's not a bad model: the 2006 surfing market was recently estimated at about $7.5 billion.

Written by Alexis Madrigal, a former gaming analyst who blogs at the rather excellent Consumer Conspicuous. Writer, producer, and consumerist, he is a product of Ridgefield, WA (pop. 3000) and Harvard’s English department. Trained as an analyst, he is interested in consumers with limitations—children, the poor, rural residents, housewives, the elderly, non-English speakers—and their uses of interactive entertainment.

Posted by Ed Cotton

mass gaming

Influx Insights — 2007-07-10T14:23:45Z

Gaming is about to undergo a major revolution; the success of Nintendo’s Wii has woken publishers, developers and the console manufacturers to the potential reality of a genuine mass market.

Everyone loves to play, but for too long gaming has defined itself and marketed to the stereotypical teenage male gamer and missed out on the rest of the population.

John Riccitiello, the CEO of EA acknowledged this problem in a recent interview.

"We're boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play.”

Here are a couple of interesting new gaming initiatives, including one one from EA.

1. Newsgames

Persuasive Games recently signed a deal with the New York Times to provide newsgames for the publishing giant. The first game, Food Import Folly explores the issue of FDA food inspections.

Gaming for Times readers, who would have thought?

2. User-Generated Fashion games

H&M and EA teamed up for The Sims to allow users to integrate H&M fashions into their game play. Instead of turning to Second Life, H&M turned to an established brand franchise to create an interactive experience.

With a branded Sims Pack, users also have the opportunity to see new designs, check out virtual stores and create their own designs, with H&M showcasing the best concepts in virtual fashion shows.

H&M’s effort is a nice integration of user-generated content, brand experience and gaming.

Expect to see more innovation from the gaming world as it tries to broaden its audience base and as advertisers chase after opportunities to engage with consumers in new and more playful ways.

Posted by Ed Cotton

xbox needs moms to play

Influx Insights — 2007-06-11T01:47:46Z

Peter Moore, VP of Xbox, in a recent Bloomberg interview, higlighted the need to expand his brand's franchise.

``If we don't make that move, make it early and expand our demographic, we will wind up in the same place as with Xbox 1, a solid business with 25 million people,'' said Peter Moore, a vice president who oversees the Xbox. ``What I need is a solid business with 90 million people.''

The Wii has changed the gaming landscape and it's competitors are finally starting to pay attention.

It will be interesting to see if Nintendo can maintain its momentum, if Xbox can realistically re-position itself as a family machine, without alienating it's core audience and if Sony can get back into the race.

The game is far from over in this category.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the first video game- 1969

Influx Insights — 2007-05-31T04:24:03Z

the rapture of gaming- photography as a planners tool

Influx Insights — 2007-04-24T13:48:41Z

Joerg Colberg's Conscientious blog has a series of links to photographers who take portrait shots of video gamers in action. It's a fascinating look at the power of gaming and how it can drag mind, body and spirit into an immersive experience. These people look like they are being controlled by a powerful force.

The shot we've included is by Shauna Frischkorn and is titled Todd- (playing test drive 2001).

Todd Deutsch is another photographer who has brilliantly captured the same subject.

As is Philip Toledano

As planners, there's a huge opportunity to use photography and photographers more. Obviously there's the work of Jan Chipchase at Nokia and IDEO who use photography to make observations about how people use technology and stuff, but how about working with a serious photographer to capture the spirit of a sub-culture or a target segment?

Anyone done this?

the thinking behind wii's success

Influx Insights — 2007-04-19T01:31:00Z

At the WOMMA Basic Training conference in New Orleans, we got the chance to hear the story behind the launch of Nintendo’s Wii from Stephen Jones of Golin Harris and Perrin Kaplan, VP Marketing at Nintendo.

Obviously Wii is a great product and was destined to be a success from the get go, but was interesting to hear the thinking that went behind it.

The presentation focused on how word of mouth and viral played a key role in re-inventing the Nintendo brand and bringing it back, when many experts had pronounced it dead.

Nintendo had to fight back; Sony and Microsoft had overtaken it and its brand was fast becoming irrelevant. The company learned from its mistakes in 1992, when its arrogance allowed Sega to enter the market. The challenge was to regain relevance, but at the same be true to the brand’s core values.

The opportunity lay in a Blue Ocean (Nintendo worked with one of the book’s authors) away from the complex world that gaming had fast become. Everyone was being excluded from it except male teens and young men and the gaming category hadn’t grown for three years.

The goal was to make gaming relevant for the masses. They expanded their focus to include everyone, ensuring they didn’t alienate the core gamer.

Nintendo saw a huge opportunity to use viral and word of mouth.

Nintendo's strategy was to explore all kinds of opportunities, but to remain flexible. Jones mentioned how easy it is to get caught up in the latest Web 2 fad and loose focus, and mentioned Twitter as an example.

Here’s what they did:

My Space: Huge media property for their core 18-34 target. They created a program with My Space to encourage users to send in videos about “play” for a contest. Users were encouraged to vote, rank and win prizes. They also gave away free MP3s from bands on a Nintendo sponsored tour.

Pre-E3: Showed national journalists (Newsweek, etc) the controller in closed sessions, to get some buzz going.

E3: There was considerable buzz about the Wii at the major gaming show. On the first day, Nintendo noticed kids sprinting down the exhibition hall to get in line to try out the Wii. Guys at the Kotaku blog captured the stampede on film.

The buzz from E3 spilled out into the mainstream media.

Offline Buzz: Wanted to get beyond the green room. Talked to producers of the Colbert Report and got it on the show. Talked to writers of South Park and got two episodes featuring the Wii. This was done out of the creators love of the product, no money changed hands. It was all about offering them something exclusive, giving them creative freedom and providing them with answers when they had questions.

The South Park episodes aired two weeks before launch.

Gaming Media: Most console manufacturers FedEx out their product to the writers at game magazines. Nintendo turned the simple act of delivery into an event; where the journalists had to pick up the consoles from police cars, security vans and ice cream trucks parked outside their offices. Of course, many writers filmed “the event” and posted it onto the web.

Brand Ambassadors: Created parties hosted by “mavens”- a couple of groups; “Maven Women” who have lots of friends and influence, they were invited to host Wii parties for their friends and multi-generational families, who got to invite up to 35 family members providing they were younger and older than them. Allowed all participants to blog, tell stories etc about the parties and their experience.

Other stories: Wii and weight loss, Mayo Clinic, Norwegian Cruise Lines buy Wii’s for their fleet.

The Results

2,000 Wii stories on Digg
30,000 consumer videos on You Tube
150,000 blog posts tagged with Wii on Technorati
37,000 blog mentions according to Blogpulse

1.9 million units sold in 4 months.

Overall, the goal was to transform Nintendo from a dead brand to an innovator, the goal was completed when the WSJ named Nintendo one of the most disruptive innovators of 2006.

It’s easy to imagine that with such a great product, stuff just happens, but as Golin Harris and Nintendo showed, there’s a huge amount of strategy, thinking and layers of implementation that go into making success happen.