The Future of Gaming is Social

The following article is an extract of my piece on The Future of Gaming & Social from Media Chain's Gaming the System research and insights report.

Click here to download the full Gaming the System report for free.

Gaming culture is complex, the audience even more so. Despite the audience being so diverse in terms of interests and playing styles, there are striking commonalities between all core gamers. They’re on the forefront of the digital world, these people are the early adopters and the taste makers that drive a huge portion of spend on entertainment products.

It’s the fact that they are so ahead of the curve that allows me to be bold in my predictions for the future. Gaming as a passion point is more mainstream than it has ever been, and it’s on the precipice of changing the entire entertainment industry as we know it. The lines are beginning to blur between games and other products – TV, music, movies.  The term transmedia has been floating around the industry for a while, but it’s becoming a reality.

Netflix have started with Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch interactive movie, Marshmello brought music and games together by performing live in Fortnite to more than 10,000,000 players, and World of Warcraft brought their game to the big screen with their movie Warcraft which raked in $430M at the box-office. The lines between gaming and other media are blurring and it’ll mean games become more social experiences in themselves.

The games industry is moving towards live games (or Games as a Service), rather than one off blockbuster titles. It’s both a cost-saving exercise and a way to sustain revenues over a longer period. Games – like Fortnite with its Battle Royale mode and FIFA’s Ultimate Team game - are now able to reach critical mass and generate significantly more revenue than selling the game retail as an upfront purchase. This all means that a game’s community has never been more important. It’s social channels are less-so a means to an end of pushing new titles, DLC, or add-ons, and more about community building and customer retention.

So as games now span the entire entertainment space and are now focussing on community and social as a way to engage and retain players – the role of social in this market has never been more important. It’s no surprise then, that I predict gamers will be increasing their social media consumption in the future.

Video and live will continue to be the prevalent formats. I believe that we’ll see gamers consuming more of this kind of content on Facebook, YouTube and Twitch whilst simultaneously moving to new platforms for discussion where communities can grow in a more structured way such as Reddit, and in Facebook Groups as well as dark-social chat platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Messenger. There’ll be a greater distinction between consumption and participation – with more conversation happening in smaller groups.

When we look at the main motivations people have for playing games, a huge amount of people – almost 80% - use games as a means of escaping from reality.  Gamers have, for many years, created online personas and characters which they use as a way of living a different life. They’re on social platforms, sharing memes and gameplay content with their friends (from the real world and those they’ve made online), and they’re talking about products they’ve bought – we know that social proof is one of the biggest motivations for purchase amongst the cohort.

All this means something brands and advertisers: It’s going to get much harder to speak to gamers in their natural habitat, especially in an authentic way. They’ll have less of an opportunity to speak to gamers when they’re in that world. When this valuable audience have separate accounts, separate personas, and separate identities online – it’s becoming increasingly hard for brands to target gamers using traditional ad formats and media buys.

The solution? We know that nearly 60% of gamers want to see brands supporting content they care about. We know that the time spent by gamers consuming traditional media is decreasing, and that time spent consuming social content is on the rise. We know they are spending hours each week watching gaming video content and watching that content for longer than any other interest group.

Brands, if they haven’t already, will need to start shifting their spend away from programmatic, away from traditional media, and into social content – either creating it themselves, or supporting a creator or channel that the audience is already connected with. The games industry has moved in that direction too, and it’s high time that non-endemics followed suit. It’s as cheap as it’ll ever be as supply currently outpaces demand – but that will change as brands realise the value of this audience. If you’re not already spending on social content in 2019, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

This article is an extract of my piece on The Future of Gaming & Social from Media Chain's Gaming the System research and insights report.

Click here to download the full Gaming the System report for free.