Classically the industry used to think about gaming as mostly male gamers escape by immersing themselves in video games 3 hours a day at home on their own
Video Gaming as a spectator sport, players watch the most elite competitive gamers going up against the best in the world for millions of dollars in front of millions of fans. Viewership and engagement is quickly outpacing major sporting events like the NBA finals and Superbowl.
People now also become gamers to be part of a community. As games have reached critical mass, players are finding life long friends and relationships through gaming. For some many fans, big events and conventions become the biggest milestone for that person every year.
Social and mobile gaming have completely changed how players engage with games. For the first time games can be played all the time and anywhere and have been giving the power to reach out and bring you back into the game at any moment. Through data driven design, games as a service has created evergreen content and is continually optimized.
The popularity of Twitch and livestreaming has completely created a new industry use case as players are becoming the content creators. Unlocking revenue streams and creating engaging passive media, watching games is now becoming one of the most popular forms of streamed entertainment
Content creators such as Smosh Gaming and Pewdiepie are becoming household names. Creators are some of the leading figures in online content and quickly changing the culture of how games are consumed.
Whether it’s a #hashtag taking over Twitter, watching everyone around you catch pokemon, or gamer icons becoming headline news gaming has become a cultural phenomena and is part of mainstream media.
More than anything, the Free to Play model has transformed how games are experienced as games and products are making an economic shift towards an engagement economy. Developers now compete over earning a player’s time rather than a $60 price tag and must compete against a sea of other titles as players have an incredible amount of choice.
Taking a look at all these different types of experiences the point i’m really trying to make…
Is that gaming is no longer ‘niche.’ gaming isn’t just about playing a game at home and the game experience is quickly moving in a multi-media direction.
Taking a quick look at our personas from player insights, we can start to simplify how we bucket our users by quickly ranking how gaming ranks amongst them. The important part to understand about these buckets is how heavily invested players need to become ‘engaged.’
