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Amazon’s Quest for Gaming Success

Leave a Comment / Gaming, Market Research, Technology / By

For Amazon, it is rarely enough simply to expand into new markets; the aim is always to become a key player in everything they do.  

Of course, Amazon has served as an important channel to market in gaming for some time now.  However, more recently, Amazon has been turning its attention to other opportunities in the gaming market.  With its launch of Luna in the autumn of 2020, it set out its stall to become a key player in Cloud Gaming.  And soon, it is set to launch New World – its major new Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG).

A New World in a Mature Market

We often think of online gaming as a new and rapidly growing market and, in many ways, it is.  However, the MMORPG space now has a long, and well-established history. 

World of Warcraft (WOW) has, since its launch way back in 2004, been the dominant player in the market.  WOW has been with us for 17 years now. Its key rival, Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIX), has now been around for 11 years. 

An MMORPG with an even longer history is RuneScape.  It doesn’t attract the number of players you’d see with the big two, but it remains a popular and enduring game.  It has been around for 20 years now – testimony to the potential longevity of a successful MMORPG.  I remember playing it years ago (yes, I used to be an adventurer like you, until I caught an arrow in the knee…).

So, MMORPG is a market with several well known (and well loved) established players.  It is also a market that has found a comfortable niche for itself.  Only around 1 in 20 gamers would say they were MMORPG fans, so it is very much a minority interest even within the gaming world.  However, as we all know, many of those fans are very devoted, spending many hours playing these games, month in, month out.

Breaking into a mature market like this, populated by several well established and popular brands, won’t be easy.  But that’s never stopped Amazon before.

MMORPG in 2021

Exact figures on player numbers are hard to come by. The major MMORPG brands keep their numbers close to their chests these days). 

WOW has been the most popular MMORPG for years now. It reached a peak of 12 million subscribers in its 2010 heyday.  Its popularity has waned somewhat since then (the last official published figure was 5.5 million subscribers in 2015) but it is still the key player.  Figures from mmo-population (which can’t be taken as gospel) currently place it as attracting around 3-4 million active players every month.  That still places it ahead of its nearest rival FFXIV, which the same source estimates to have around 2-3 million active players per month.

FFXIV took a while to get established but in more recent years it seems to have been steadily building momentum.  In the overall scheme of things, it came to the market fairly late (2010). At that time WOW was most dominant.   Its success has come from a long haul rather than an overnight sensation but is now well placed to challenge WOW for the crown.  It has taken a while to get to where it is today and that is despite the advantage of being based on a popular franchise that has been around since 1987.  This just goes to show that establishing a successful game in the world of MMORPG can be a tough grind.

But that is often what it takes to make it in a mature market – sheer persistence, coupled with getting things right over the long-term, counts for much.  After all, the nature of the genre is as much about building an engaged community as it is about selling a game.

Mature but Attractive

Attracting 2-4 million players worldwide each month may not seem like so many.  These numbers are easily dwarfed by the tens of millions that play many free-to-play games (not least Hearthstone, WOW’s free-to-play spin-off card trader).  However, WOWs players are not free-to-play, they provide Activation Blizzard with a regular source of fee-paying subscription income. 

So, it is a potentially lucrative market to get into.  You can see the appeal for the likes of Amazon.

How then might Amazon go about establishing New World as a leading MMORPG?

Troubles at Activation Blizzard

Any discussion of WOW these days can’t ignore the elephant in the room.  WOW has clearly suffered from the sexual harassment scandal that has engulfed Activation Blizzard.  Many point to a migration of MMORPG players away from WOW to the likes of FFXIV as being a direct result of this.  Some speculate that perhaps WOW may finally be on the verge of losing its market leading position.

Could this be a weakness that might be exploited?  With Amazon about to launch New World, the scandal that broke at Activation Blizzard over the summer could hardly have come at a worse time.

However, despite these troubles, I still think it would be a brave man who’d bet against WOW in the long run.  Many have forecast its demise before, only to be proved wrong.  The game has proven surprisingly resilient over the years. 

The scandal has left WOW vulnerable but by no means fatally so.  But the onus is clearly on Activation Blizzard to get its house in order and any failure to do so could yet lead to its demise.  All that said, Amazon will need to do a lot more than simply capitalise on WOW’s woes to establish New World as a key force in the MMORPG space

Entering Mature Markets

The strategies that Amazon can use for successfully entering this market are not any much different from entering any other mature market.

First off, the mere fact that the market is mature means that it is inherently difficult to do anything radically different or ground-breaking.  However, that is not to say it’s impossible to re-imagine and re-package the MMORPG concept in fresh and appealing ways. 

Secondly, we need to remember the Jeff Bezos maxim “Your margin is my opportunity”, and the current subscription models generate a margin that Amazon can attack. 

Thirdly, one way to attack a mature market is to make creative use of channels to market – by finding new and innovative ways to reach out to your target audience.

These will be the three things to watch out for in my view.  If Amazon can get these elements right, it will, with perseverance, successfully carve out a place for its New World.

The New World

There are a number of ways in which New World may be able to offer enough points of difference to tempt players into giving it a try (and more importantly, retain them).

New World does have the advantage of being new.  While it lacks the historic pedigree of its rivals, the flip side of that is that it also lacks the baggage. There is an advantage in representing a completely fresh start.  It can leverage the latest technology without having to worry about legacy and, if it can do that well enough, it can make itself stand out.

It has so far promoted itself as offering a strong Player v Player (PvP) element.  This may prove an attractive selling point if it works reliably.  The beta test revealed some possible issues here, but Amazon should have the necessary resources to set these right.  Certainly, the lesson of Cyberpunk 2077 should be that premature launches are dangerous waters.  In the MMORPG market, this can be especially costly.  FFXIV’s faltering start in 2010, cost it a good three or four years before it was able to get to a place where it could build some momentum.  Amazon must avoid this at all costs.

Building a Strong MMORPG

New World’s early modern world setting is different enough and certainly promises the potential to offer a rich gaming environment.  The challenge now is to really bring that to life with strong narrative content.

In the long run, it is crucial for an MMORPG, perhaps now more than ever before, to have a strong set of engaging storylines and intriguing quests.  Strong PvP is great but Player v Environment (PvE) is key. PvE has, for many WOW players, been the key to WOWs enduring popularity.  Indeed, many MMORPG players never or rarely play PvP.  For these players, the richness of the environment, the quality of the quests and the strength of storytelling is why they play.  This is what ultimately wins and retains players.  This will be the key test for Amazon’s New World.

Margins of Opportunity

A real strength of Amazon is the brand’s ability to bring compelling offers to market at a great price.  It is a common Amazon play to attack a market with the aim of making lower margins to leverage a price advantage that buys market share.

With New World the approach to pricing looks like it might be designed to create just such a point of competitive difference.

Rather than charging a monthly subscription, it looks like New World will simply require a single one-off payment.  In all likelihood, it will then seek to make money from the publication of additional in-game content.  That seems like an approach deliberately designed to attack the competition – why pay monthly fees when you can get the rival product for a one-off cost that’s less than a six month subscription?

That would appear to the aim anyway.  A point of difference for sure – but it remains to be seen how appealing this will prove to be in practice.

Leveraging New Channels

In launching the beta version, Amazon set out its stall to attract key influencers in the form of streamers.  Amazon have bet that if they can get enough streamers to buy into the concept, these people can each promote New World to potentially hundreds of followers.

Ultimately, the gaming market is heavily influenced by a cohort of highly engaged gamers who stream content, write blogs and contribute to online reviews and game ratings.  They represent a highly influential minority and, if you can get them on board, they will do much of the work of promoting your game to the wider market for you.

Amazon have realised this and have clearly tried to woo these influencers during their beta testing.  The only question is, have they made a strong enough impression upon these people to have sold their New World to them?  The obvious risk stems from the fact that these streamers are not beholden to Amazon.  If they like the game, they will promote it to a wide audience quickly.  But if they don’t like it, they could just as easily put potential players off.

Launch

New World launches later this autumn.  That’s when we’ll begin to find out if Amazon have got the ingredients right. 

Launching in a mature market does require persistence and can be a tough learning experience if you haven’t got your ducks in a row.  The one thing Amazon can’t afford is to launch with anything incomplete or buggy.

However, if it can launch a game with that works well for PvP, offers good value, makes good use of new technology and which, critically, offers strong worldbuilding and storytelling, it could make a serious impact on the world of MMORPGs.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future. 

You can read more about us on our website.  

If you wish to follow our weekly blog you can view all out past articles on our website here.

If you have any specific questions about our services, please contact us.

Sources

Activision Blizzard

Denofgeek

Eurogamer

mmo-population

PC Gamer

Windows Central

Two gamers playing on a phone

The Casual Gaming Boom

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Gaming / By

Casual gaming has been around in one form or another for years.  You might even argue that some of the earliest games like Pac Man could be classed as casual games.  However, the genre has really taken off over the past decade.  The increased use of social media and the ubiquity of Smartphones has created the perfect environment in which casual gaming has been able to flourish.

App Annie predicts that mobile gaming spending in 2021 is on track to surpass $120 billion.  As a substantial chunk of that spend will be on casual and hyper casual games; the enormous size of the opportunities are self-evident. 

So, are we experiencing a casual gaming boom?

Who is the ‘casual’ gamer?

A decade or so ago, if you asked people to describe a gamer, the image of a teenage boy playing Call of Duty late at night on his games console would likely have sprung to mind.  Or, perhaps, they might be playing World of Warcraft on a desktop PC instead. But things have moved on a lot since then.

People who play casual and hyper casual games now include a great many gamers who never play either on a console or a PC.  A significant number of these gamers have come to gaming more recently and, indeed, might only ever experience gaming on a Smartphone or, perhaps, a tablet. 

This, then, represents a different audience of gamers from the traditional gaming market.  It is a much more female focused audience and has many different likes and dislikes, hobbies and consumer preferences that would distinguish the casual gamer from someone who might prefer to play CoD on an Xbox or Cyberpunk 2077 on a PC.

The gaming market is no longer a single homogenous audience, but rather a collection of different (if sometimes overlapping) audiences.  That means different channels, different media and very different commercial opportunities. Different audiences also provide very different opportunities in terms of the future potential for advertising and sponsorship deals.

But casual gaming is also a market that is still growing.  So, the composition of this audience is changing and evolving each year.

The audience is not only different in terms of its composition. It is also clearly different in terms of what people are looking for from gaming.

The Casual Gaming Experience

Games like Assassin’s Creed and Cyberpunk 2077 are enthralling role-playing experiences.  Many people play these games precisely because they like to get into the characters and absorb themselves in a fantasy world.

It is easy to sit down in front of PC or a console and lose yourself for hours in a highly engrossing escapist experience.  In addition, it’s an experience that can be very intense, requiring sometimes lengthy periods of quite focused concentration.  This can be quite a mentally challenging experience.  It may also be quite difficult to dip in and out of – you often feel obliged to hang on just to get to that next cut-scene or to find a good place to save.

But casual and hyper casual games are far less demanding in terms of concentrated time.  You can potentially play a game in 15 or 20 minutes.  This makes it easy to fit your gaming in around other things.  Play a quick game in your lunch hour, or a quick couple of games on the train on your commute to and from work.  As one casual gamer put it on an online forum:

I play half an hour to an hour on my phone everyday. I don’t really have much to do while I’m on the bus or at lunch, so I’d just use to time to play video games on my phone.

Relax with a casual game

It’s because these game can be less mentally demanding that people are more likely to see them as relaxing.  They deliver a means to wind down after a hard day’s work.  As another gamer put it:

What I loved so much about Animal Crossing was how I could wind down and relax.

As such, these games lend themselves more to humour, light-hearted entertainment, and cartoon characters.

fun and utterly hilarious.

But, whilst it is possible to quickly fit in a game in your coffee break, it is still also possible for gamers to spend hours playing such casual games.  Indeed, gamers can and do become every bit as a engrossed with games like Clash of Clans on their mobile phones as a console gamer might with Red Dead Redemption.

In a way gaming is becoming not that much different from television.  TV producers have, for many years, understood that working within different genres means appealing to different audiences.  The audience you might attract for an enthralling thriller is not the same as you’d get for a light entertainment programme. 

So, as the variety of different gaming genres evolves, so too will the variety of audiences.  And so too will the need to understand them independently from each other.

A Blank Canvas

Many of the new generation of casual gamers have come to gaming via the Smartphone and via casual games specifically.  There are many amongst them who have never played a console game or even a PC game.  Perhaps, they have only started playing games within the past few years.  All this means that they are not constrained by any of the pre-conceptions that PC and console gaming fans might have.  That means they represent much more of a ‘greenfield’ opportunity for the future.

This relative lack of ‘expectations’ is likely to mean these gamers are more open to experimenting with new things.  Perhaps they are more open to in-game advertising, perhaps they offer the best opportunities for cloud.  Indeed, any genuinely new innovation in gaming might find a more fertile ground for uptake amongst these gamers than elsewhere.

On the downside, it should be remembered that many of these newer gamers may well not be so familiar with concepts that gaming publishers and developers might ‘assume’ gamers know about.  That means gaming companies need to be careful in using gaming jargon – these guys just might not understand it (or worse, misunderstand it). 

Assume nothing.

Cloud?

Mobile gaming may well prove to be an area to watch in terms of cloud streaming services such as Google Stadia, Microsoft’s Ultimate Game Pass and Amazon Luna. 

The mobile casual gaming audience includes many gamers who are not wedded to traditional console and PC gaming.  They will also include many people who are comfortable with streaming film or music to their mobiles already, so cloud gaming won’t be an alien concept to them.  But here, the cloud services need to get their content right.  Content, after all, is king – demand will entirely depend on a wide enough choice of content.

However here again, gaming companies need to be careful.  These people are not the enthusiastic, technically literate, hardcore of the gaming world.  They may not even have heard of cloud gaming or even understand what makes it any different from other forms of gaming.  They probably haven’t read any of the articles on the subject that appear in the gaming press.  So, this raises the question – how best to market such services to such people? 

Monetisation

Gaming has historically been financed by gamers paying for their games (either outright or perhaps by subscription).  However, recent years have seen a growing proportion of revenues generated by microtransactions where gamers seek to buy in-game content such as upgrades to the game, additional equipment (some functional, some purely aesthetic) and so on.

There are many games available where you can play a basic version of the game for free and any revenues come purely from upgrades to a more complete version of the game and/or from microtransactions.

The free-to-play model has proven a successful option and in future I can see this approach extended to deliver an even higher proportion of content for free.  Monetisation here will therefore be increasingly driven by the microtransaction approach and even by advertising and sponsorship deals.

TV is significantly financed by private advertising and sponsorship and this is now an increasingly important revenue stream for esports – it is surely only a matter of time before we start to see this proliferate across the gaming industry.  The obvious route in will be through the Smartphone based games – and that means casual gaming is likely to be at the forefront.

However, to capitalise on these opportunities gaming companies will increasingly need to learn from the playbook of other entertainment industries (like TV) who have been playing the advertising and sponsorship game far longer.  That means understanding audiences and knowing what advertisers and/or sponsors would offer a great fit for any given audience.  It also means finding the best way to accommodate this without disrupting game play or without it becoming overly intrusive.

Channels

One potentially dark cloud on the casual gaming horizon relates to channels.  At the end of the day casual gaming on Smartphones depends very heavily on two key channels – App Store and Google Play.  This grants Apple and Google incredible market power.

The current legal dispute between Epic and Apple has highlighted the potential problem here – are these channels becoming so dominant that they can effectively squeeze the margins of gaming companies down to near minimal levels?  This very fear has led Epic to invest heavily in its own store front.  At the time of writing, it is yet to be seen as to whether Epic’s legal action with Apple will change anything.

Nevertheless, Epic’s move to develop its own store may yet prove to be a shrewd one for the longer term.  You only need to look at food retailing in the UK to see that a relatively small number of dominant retail chains can seriously squeeze the margins of the food producers. 

The Future

There is little doubt that we will continue to see continued growth and diversity emerge in the casual gaming market over the next couple of years.  New audiences will continue to emerge and evolve as a result.

The challenge for the gaming companies will be to find ways to best capitalise on these audiences – and that will require a detailed understanding of them, plus, of course, how they continue to evolve.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

We have considerable experience in the design and execution of market research surveys in the gaming, leisure and consumer tech sector.  We can offer a range of services to help you identify new market opportunities and to understand the current and potential audience for any given game. 

You can find out more about us on our website.  

If you wish to follow our weekly blog you can view all our past articles on our website here.

If you have any specific questions about our services, please contact us.

Sources

ANIMAL CROSSING COMMUNITY

APPANNIE

BBC

COMMONSENSEMEDIA

GAMESKINNY

MARKET WATCH

QUORA

SEATTLE TIMES

The Rise of the Female Gamer

Leave a Comment / Consumer behaviour, Gaming, Market Research / By

One half of all gamers are women

Gaming is fast becoming as much a female hobby as a male one.

Once upon a time we used to think of gamers, almost exclusively, as young, heterosexual, white, and male.  That is no longer the case.  Gaming is now a popular pastime and today’s “gamers” are a more diverse community than ever before.

These days, around half of all gamers are women – a fact confirmed by more than one 2020 survey reported on UKIE’s ukiepedia site.  Despite this, many women who play games (two-thirds) do not regard “gaming” as one of their hobbies. 

Why don’t women see themselves as gamers?

So why is this?

Perhaps some mostly only play casual games on mobile devices and are less inclined to regard this as “proper” gaming.  Or perhaps some have come to the hobby so recently that they don’t yet see themselves as gamers. Or perhaps the traditional image of the gaming community as a male dominated sphere makes some women reluctant to overtly identify with it.

Anecdotally, women are still a lot less likely to buy from sites such as Steam and, although accurate figures on such sites are hard to come by, there is some evidence to support this.  One 2015 analysis estimated that only between 4% and 18% of visitors to the Steam homepage were actually women.  Now this may well have changed but it does suggest that there are certain gaming environments where you are less likely to find a female gamer. 

Whether or not women as yet represent half of the gaming market in value terms is an open question.  However, they clearly now represent one half of all gamers.  And, no one would argue that, if provided with the right products, women will not spend as much as men.

But if this potential is to be fully realised, we first need to consider what factors, if any, might be holding things back.

What’s putting women off?

One factor that we certainly can’t afford to ignore is that some (possibly many) female gamers have been put off by the toxic misogyny that has been present in certain sections of the gaming community.  This came to an unpleasant head in 2014 with the gamergate controversy.  Attitudes and incidents of this sort will no doubt discourage at least some women from identifying too closely with the gaming community.  It is particularly likely put off others from engaging in some multiplayer games, where they are more likely to encounter such unpleasant behaviour.

Qualitative research has suggested that the online multi-player environment can be particularly problematic for women gamers.  This study suggested that female gamers did, for example, seek to “…mitigate online harassment, including actively hiding their identity and avoiding all forms of verbal communication with other players.”   This may explain, at least partly, why only 33% of women who play games are happy to self-identify as gamers.

When the hobby gets things right

All that said, some studies suggest the hobby is catering more for female gamers than used to be the case.  A 2016 study by Indiana University analysed 571 gaming titles over a 31 year period and claimed that there had been a decline, since 2005, in the level of sexualisation of female characters. 

It is also the case that there will also be certain spaces where you’d be a lot more likely to find female gamers.  Many would argue that female gamers become a lot more significant when it comes to mobile and casual gaming.  For certain games, the female audience can approach 80% but for others it can be as low as 8% and for others closer to 50/50. 

Clearly some games have done a great job of attracting a significant female following, for instance, by offering strong and interesting female character choices.  Games like Horizon Zero Dawn may be an example of this.   As Malindy Hetfield wrote on Polygon: The complex representation of women in different social spheres throughout Horizon Zero Dawn is one of its best features.

Game developers who make the effort to understand and cater for the female audience can potentially unlock a significant future market. All it requires is a good understanding of what that market wants and the ability to develop and market it in an authentic and appealing way.

One potential issue here is the fact that women still represent a minority of people working in the games industry.  UKIE’s 2020 game industry census reported that women make up only 28% of the workforce.  Getting women more involved in the creative process of games development can surely only enrich the end result.

Tapping into the female gamer audience

However, one size is unlikely to fit all and, with so many women now playing games, it would be wrong to think of them as a single homogenous audience.  Some women may prefer casual tile matching games and puzzles but others like enthralling RPGs, or racing games.  The future is likely to see a variety of different female audiences emerge within different gaming genres. 

Tastes are evolving and changing over time and if game developers can find creative ways to tap into the female gaming market, the potential opportunities are clearly significant.  The challenge is to find the right audience and understand how best to reach them with the right products and messages.

We can help in this process by providing audience profiling and segmentation market research services.  If you’d like to find out more about these services, please contact us for more information.

Discovering the Future of Cloud Gaming

Leave a Comment / Gaming, Market Research / By

People keep talking about it, but will 2021 finally be the year that cloud gaming comes of age?  Will we be seeing an end to discs and downloads as gamers discover a new age of streaming?

The emergence of new services

At the end of 2020 new Cloud gaming services like Stadia, Microsoft’s Ultimate Game Pass and now Amazon’s Luna began to emerge as serious, more rounded, offers.  However, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, many of these services remain at an early stage of development.  Clearly, the ability to offer a wide range of good quality game content, that works well on many different platforms, represents two essential preconditions that need to be met before these services can make a real impact.  Progress is being made but there is still a long way to go.

The elephant in the room – internet connectivity

The elephant in the room, of course, is the quality of the player’s internet connection.  Looking ahead, you can see how developments like 5G will open up the potential for streaming to mobile, and broadband services in general can be expected to help expand this market. 

That said, the situation today is that many people lack an internet connection that can adequately stream these services as they stand.

This means that the sweet spot for these services at present will be those people with a good broadband connection, who aren’t wedded to the idea of having the latest and greatest console/PC set-up.  The big question is – how small/large is this sweet spot? 

The sweet spot

Those in the sweet spot will include those new to gaming, who are not particularly devoted to a specific hardware set-up.  The PS and Xbox lovers seem keen to continue to invest in consoles.  So too, I would argue, the hardcore PC gamer.  I am sure that some of these people will be happy to experiment with game streaming.  As they are likely to be open to experimentation with any new developments in gaming.

However, there may be newer audiences emerging in terms of people who have taken to gaming a lot more during lockdown.  Another group might be the older generations of gamers – people more likely to have old/outdated gaming platform set-ups.  A third group to look out for would be female gamers – less wedded to consoles and PCs and far more at home gaming on a mobile device.

Cloud gaming might provide these people with a relatively quick and easy way to play new games without needing to get the latest consoles.  Obviously, these services will need to effectively connect with these people and get their messaging right.  After all, many of these people are a different audience from the hardcore gamers currently queuing up to buy the very latest consoles. 

The need to promote real benefits

There is also a potential problem here – and that is that I wonder if they are even promoting the right benefits?

To use these services effectively at the moment you must have a great internet connection.  I suspect that those gamers with great connections are also likely to be the same people with the latest Xbox / PS console or with high powered PCs.  They will be the very same people who have easiest access to the latest games because their tech can handle them.  They are also likely to be the people who will suffer the least from problems when downloading games. 

As a result, some of the benefits that cloud gaming often talks about are least likely to be issues for people with the best internet connections.  So, what is the point of pushing the message that you do not need the latest hardware, if the people with the fastest, most reliable speeds have the latest hardware anyway? And what is the point of telling them that they do not need to worry about slow downloads or troublesome upgrades when it is not a problem, because most of them have top-end fibre connectivity? 

So, the big question is, what other benefits are these services offering? 

Content is King

The obvious key requirement for these services to have any future at all will be for them to offer a strong library of relevant content.  Because for any streaming service, content is king after all.  Offering a few dozen titles (not all of which work on all platforms) is not that great to say the least.  100 titles – so what?  Steam offer thousands of titles!  Once people can be sure, for example, that all Xbox games are available for streaming on Ultimate Game Pass – then we would be cooking on gas.

At present content libraries are a bit scant, although they are growing.  The appeal of a streaming service will be limited by the range and quality of the content it can offer and its ability to deliver that content on any platform with consummate ease.

Just compare these services with successful, mass-market, film or music streaming services.  Netflix UK offers 6,500 films and box sets, including much unique content, available over pretty much any platform you could want.  Currently, cloud gaming services come nowhere near offering that kind of choice.  And if those services can take one lesson from film and TV streaming, it will be that the provision of attractive original content is likely to be the most important determinant of longer-term success (or failure).

The Right Business Model

Finally, these services are going to need to find the right business model for delivering cloud gaming.  Currently, things are at an early stage and, I suspect, many providers are still feeling their way.

The benchmark standards have already been set by the music and film streaming services.  These are the standards by which cloud gaming will ultimately be judged. 

Netflix UK deliver their service for an all-in cost of £84-£168 a year.  Now, buying a film on a DVD is generally cheaper than buying a game on disc so, granted, it is not 100% comparable.  That said, film and music streaming services have, in many ways, set expectations in consumers’ minds as to how successful streaming services should work. Which is that an all-in price provides access to a large amount of content.

On the other hand, Amazon’s film and TV streaming works a little differently in so far as you get access to a lot of free stuff and then pay extra for the premium content.  That works because there is a lot of essentially free content. 

So, when all is said and done, cloud gaming is likely going to need to develop an approach like the models that have been shown to work well for film and TV.  And that, of course, brings us back to the need for content.

A year of evolution rather than revolution

On balance, 2021 is more likely to prove to be a year of evolution and experimentation rather than one of revolution.  It is likely that these services will need this time to build their functionality and gaming libraries.  In addition to that, they will probably go through a period of experimentation whilst they get their business models right.  

That said, it is quite possible that by the end of the year we may see some of these services develop the necessary content libraries, business model and technology to start making a more serious in-road into the traditional gaming market.  The potential is there – at the end of the day, if it can work for film and TV then it can work for gaming.  But there is still a fair journey to go before realising that potential.

Discovering the Future of Mobile Gaming

Leave a Comment / Gaming / By

Mobile gaming has achieved massive popularity in recent years.  The pandemic of 2020 has seen it boom, with Facebook figures reported in the Drum, showing mobile gaming hours spent on its platform doubling when comparing Q4 2019 with Q4 2020.  So, what might we expect to see in the coming year?  Here’s our take on four key things to look out for in the development of mobile gaming in 2021.

Firstly, 2021 will see the roll out of 5G. The consequence of this is that it will become increasing easy to stream games over mobile and this will open the door to new possibilities in terms of gaming development. 

The most popular mobile games up to now have tended to be puzzle games, arcade games and other what might be termed “casual” games.  Part of the reason for their popularity relates to the fact that they are well suited to playing quick games on-the-go on your phone (for example, whilst you are commuting or taking your lunch break).  No doubt that will remain very influential in how the market develops.  That said, other types of games may currently be less popular on mobile only because of the limitations of the technology.  So, if 5G is combined with a great use of edge computing this will allow mobile gamers to play games that offer better graphics combined with a more interactive, immersive experience than has previously been the case.  As a result, we may well find that other gaming genres can finally become more popular on mobile.

Secondly, we should look out for further developments in terms of the links between gaming and social media on mobile over the coming year.  The original Farmville demonstrated the potential of social media gaming on Facebook over a decade ago.  Recently Farmville was retired from Facebook (its flash technology finally consigning it to the history books) but it has provided the blueprint for casual gaming success.  Zynga’s founder, Marc Pincus, noted in his recent Twitter feed that “The real innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible to busy adults, giving them a place to invest and express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative.” Farmville on Facebook may be gone but Farmville 3 will aim to emulate its success on mobile.  But Zygna are by no means done with social media.  In 2020, Snap Games’ players exceeded 100 million, prompting Zynga to enter into a partnership with them to create multiplayer games for their platform.  Facebook too has moved on with its own gaming app and has seen gaming activity double in 2020.  It will be interesting to see how social media platforms and gaming companies seek to find new ways to exploit the opportunities offered by such an obvious symbiotic relationship during 2021.

Thirdly, is the huge potential mobile gaming offers as the advertising media of the future.  There is clear potential here to reach an engaged, fast growing, mass market audience.  Finding ways in which to make this work & exploring how best to use this new media will be an area where we’d expect to see some significant developments in 2021.  And the way forward may not simply be in-game ads but also sponsorships and in-game product placement (less intrusive and potentially as impactful as any influencer endorsement).   Reaching global audiences in the tens of millions means that mobile gaming is not a medium that advertisers can afford to ignore.

Fourthly (and finally), mobile gaming may well prove to be an area to watch in terms of cloud streaming services such as Google Stadia, Microsoft’s Ultimate Game Pass and Amazon Luna. 

These services will need to do some work to get the technology right and (more important in many ways) the content.  5G will have a role to play in terms of the former but, assuming they can get their ducks in a row, mobile could well be the platform to watch.  Why?  Because the mobile gaming audience will include a great many new as well as casual gamers who are not wedded to traditional console and PC gaming.  They will also include many people who are comfortable with streaming film or music to their mobiles already, so Cloud Gaming will not seem like a strange concept to them. 

However, there are barriers here that will need to be overcome – the availability of faster reliable connections (which 5G can play a role in providing) and the limitations of data caps will likely mean that cloud gaming on mobile will start off niche.  More important will be the availability of a strong library of mobile games (and here it is still very early days).  Of course, these services also need to get their business model right – can they evolve a model that is closer to a Netflix or a Spotify to really enable them to connect with a mass market?  All that said, mobile has the potential to offer some significant longer-term opportunities for Cloud services and it is worth watching out for how this develops over 2021.

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