The Most Common Gamer Online Is A Woman

The stats are in from comScore, and it may cause some people a shock: Woman are spending more time online than men. Female gamers over 55 spend the most time gaming of any demographic group, and they are nearly as common as males age 15 to 24.

If you're marketing a game on the internet (and who isn't these days?) you need to consider this demographic information as you put together your marketing campaign. I think part of the problem the gaming industry (both electronic and paper) has been having recently is that the industry has been focused since its inception on boys as its target audience (boys of all ages...). As the market has grown to include girls (and women!) the focus hasn't shifted, which means both product development and marketing haven't taken the changing demographics into account. Which has allowed Zynga to make roughly a zillion dollars by appealing to women at least as much as to men (and I'd bet Farmville has more female than male users; any takers?). A PopCap study showed that 55% of social gamers are female. Blizzard knows World of Warcraft has around a 40%  female audience. Yet the classic gaming companies like Activision and EA haven't seemed to focus as much effort on women in their releases or their marketing.

This is changing as social gaming becomes more important, but there's a lot of inertia to overcome. Don't lose out on sales by skewing your marketing (or your product development!) too heavily towards males, unless you really don't think your title would have much appeal to women. If you're a male, get a reality check or three by showing your marketing to some women to see what they think, and how they react. Adjust your marketing so that you can appeal to women as well as men... and perhaps you can see some additional sales.

How Not To Create Cover Art

Cover art may seem outdated in this emerging era of digital distribution, but physical products still command a majority of the sales and will for some time. Even for products that don't have a physical presence, a compelling visual and a catchy title is useful on a web page or product page. Good cover art can help sell products, especially when surrounded by the right words.

The corollary, of course, is that bad cover art can keep your product from selling. This article shows a number of horrible game covers, some from the not-so-distant past. It's good for a laugh, but it's worth looking at these covers and thinking about just what it is that makes them so bad.

For the most part, the artwork used didn't represent what the game was about; in some cases it was amazingly far away from the nature of the game (an old guy with a banjo? Really? How does that connect with a space shooter?). The above example is bad on so many levels. I can only hope that the artwork shown is not taken from the game; if that's the best you've got, don't even bother to put the thing on the market.

Let's start by noting that the title is all but unreadable. Your title should be clearly readable; better still, pronounceable; and for full credit, it should have something to do with the game and get the customer interested.

As for the artwork... it should be as excellent as you can afford. Hopefully you or someone you know has the ability to tell good art from bad, or at least can hire a competent art director to make that judgment for you. The art should be clearly understandable at a glance, and communicate the key features of the game (the same key features you decided on when you created your product platform document... which I will discuss in an article on my web site).

Glancing at the examples shown in the article will give you a lesson in many ways to fail at good cover art, and a good laugh or two.

Google Games Makes Another Move

Google continues to build up its gaming portfolio with the acquisition of Slide, a social gaming site, for $182 million. As for how Google plans to use this acquisition, they're basically not saying much. Only that they will continue to improve the social aspects of many of their products.

It's pretty clear that Google intends to be a big player in social media, and not to just let Facebook own the whole space. Games are one of the biggest drivers of social media page views, as Farmville and its ilk cleverly encourage people to hit the site again and again... while encouraging their friends to join, too. So if Google wants to really drive adoption of its social platforms, it needs to have games as part of the mix.

The rapid rise of social gaming continues, as Japanese social gaming company DeNA is on track to hit $1 billion in revenue, according to TechCrunch. Zynga is poised to hit a similar revenue number in 2011, according to reports. Whoosh! That's rapid growth even by Google standards.

What does it mean for small developers? Opportunities abound on the social and mobile game spaces, and you don't need to have a huge budget to get there. Some of the most interesting game designs can be found on paper in the adventure gaming hobby; the time is ripe to see if some of those could be breakout hits in downloadable PC games, social, or mobile spaces. This new wave in gaming is barely under way in terms of design advancement; look how many of the social games are merely clones of one another with the IP scrubbed off and another one applied. But this is changing fast, and the opportunities are many.

We're All Fine Here...

Just a small reactor leak, we've got it locked down.

Or at least, that's the word from the Entertainment Merchants Association, the industry organization for retailers who sell DVDs and videogames. They're saying that all this talk about digital distribution is just air, because 80% to 90% of videogames sold were on physical media. See, retail stores are doing great. That big cold thing in the water we're heading towards must be the ice I ordered for our cocktails. Isn't this a great cruise?

Where to begin? First I'll note that the "80% to 90%" figure seems awfully vague, and there's no mention of how that figure was arrived at. Could it have been pulled out of, let's say, thin air? Second, even if you grant that range, what would it have been a couple of years ago? Next to nothing... and now it's somewhere between 10% and 20%. Seems like a pretty swift growth rate. It wouldn't take long at that rate to turn physical distribution into a rounding error.

Digital distribution offers many advantages to publishers and consumers alike. Publishers can save huge amounts of money on the cost of production, and even more money by not giving up any margin to retailers or distributors. Customers get their product without ever having to leave home. Digital distributors (like Steam) have found that they can get huge sales increases by lowering prices, which they can do because the margins are so huge. This also benefits consumers, who can score new games for far less than the usual retail price.

Digital distribution is devastating for retailers, which is why they're trying so hard to believe it's not happening. (Though GameStop is making acquisitions like Kongregate to prepare for this future.) Don't be fooled; it's happening, it's happening fast, and it's going to change everything about the game industry and the book industry. The music business tried to disbelieve, and they even tried to use lawsuits to kill the process. They succeeded in delaying and mutating the transition for a while, but in the end the big music publishers have ended up losing out in many ways.

Don't be like them. Revise your strategies and business models so you can take advantage of this change. This is a tremendous opportunity; whenever a market is shaken up it's a chance for smaller players to become big.

Planning for Christmas

It's that time of year again... if you haven't already created marketing plans to take advantage of holiday spending, now's the time. Why so early? Because timing is key. You want to lock up what they call those "open-to-buy dollars" with your products before they get spent on someone else's. This is why store promotions for seasonal items tend to creep backwards in time; they're trying to get the jump on their competitors. If they put out their big "Halloween Sale!" or "Back-to-School Sale" the weekend before the rival chain does, they can grab a lot of the dollars that might otherwise be spent at the rival.

This works even at the smaller end of the game market, with adventure games or mobile games or whatnot. Hit your user base with some specials to encourage their buying. Perhaps create some sort of holiday-themed version of your product, or some downloadable content to use with your product. Get creative! While you're at it, don't forget to take advantage of other holidays and reasons for buying. It would be great if you had a regular promotion cycle, and thus each year the promotion could reach further as word spread about it.

10 Million Units

If anything shows more clearly that the videogame industry is heading for big troubles, it's this. Bioware says their target is selling 10 million units of a new title, and if they don't hit that they aren't making money. Which means a massive investment and time and money, and very few titles are making those kind of numbers. Your margin for error becomes very small indeed. It's as if you were making movies, and said the only way you could make money would be to hit $300 million in sales. I don't think you'll find any studios that would say that; maybe on some films, but not on all of their films. Savvy studios find ways to make money on little movies that only cost them a tenth as much. Some make money on TV shows that cost 1/100th as much... variety keeps the risk lower.

Variety is an important thing to remember when crafting your marketing and product development strategies. Your target demographic probably enjoys more than one type of entertainment. They may like a AAA console FPS, but they may also enjoy a Flash-based game on Kongregate. Or a fantasy novel. Or a card game or a board game. They may not be able to drop $60 on a new console title every month, so they look for a free-to-play game online. There are more options these days, so putting your business's success into one risky type of investment seems less than optimal, to put it nicely. Leverage your IP into multiple titles at different price points and entertainment types (either developing it yourself or through licensing); you'll make products more cheaply, increase your chances for a hit, and promote the brand better.

3D 3Dead?

I've excited some interest over on Gamasutra with my post 5 Reasons 3D Display Is Doomed. Perhaps my headline was a trifle overstated for marketing purposes, but I do think the odds are stacked against 3D display becoming a major driver of game industry growth. (3D Display is the rage in theaters since Avatar, and makers of TV sets and Blu-ray players have jumped on it in an effort to sell more hardware; now console game manufacturers are promoting it, too).

I think this could use some very heavy marketing spending to improve its odds of success. But will companies pony up for such an effort? There are two separate issues at work: Whether 3D Display will succeed in movies and TV markets (and thus drive sales of 3D TVs), and whether 3D Display will succeed in the console market. The two are connected; without 3D movies and TV driving sales, it seems highly doubtful that consumers would spend thousands extra for a 3D TV and 3D glasses just to play games. Without a large installed base, will developers create 3D Display-specific titles? Without working on a title to make sure it looks good in 3D Display, how will it look or play? If game titles don't really take advantage of 3D Display, or at least look better, or (best of all) actually have game play that is exciting and requires 3D Display, will anyone adopt it?

The rumblings are starting to appear from many quarters; check out this story on Gizmodo, reporting on Roger Ebert. Or this story on Kotaku, about some less-than-stellar results of trying out 3D games. This does not seem like the early buzz that portends a huge wave of buying into new hardware that costs thousands of dollars. It can happen, but too many things have to go exactly right for me to think this is a high probability.

Where does that leave you as a game marketer? Ignore the hype and push reality; sell the customers on what they can buy now (which is your product). If this begins to happen, you'll know well in advance and can adjust accordingly. Until then I think it's hurting the industry as a whole to be pushing a technology whose benefits are unclear and that you can't even buy right now.