Candy Crush Nintendo: The changing world of video gaming
While gaming is touted as one of the next big things for advertisers Scott Heron looks at what this week’s events with Candy Crush and Nintendo tell us about the state of the industry
It was an interesting week in video gaming as Nintendo’s stock slid 20 per cent on poor earnings , while a social media gaming company called King.com successfully trademarked the word ‘candy’ in the US.
Heron
Video game marketing has been an interesting area for a long time. If digital marketing is a ‘lean forward’ medium, than video gaming could be described as ‘lean way-forward’. Users are extremely engaged, playing games for hours a day, and there are loads of in-game branding opportunities.
Nonsense. The PS4 and xbox one have been the fastest selling console launches in history, how is that “struggling”. The Wii U isn’t selling because after an 8 year console cycle the market and developers were crying out for consoles with more horse power, not a new approach to interaction. Spending on consoles fell since 2008 because they’d been out for 3 years already, thats the traditional peak sales year for consoles and is nothing new in the gaming industry. Sales past that year were also so strong that it stretched out the last console generation. China just removed laws prohibiting console sales. there is an extremely positive outlook for Sony and Microsoft.
People play games on phones… yeah, we know. we’re those people.
The gaming industry is having a really interesting time in marketing at the moment – because a lot of what’s happened over the past 12 months or so has resulted in a big breakdown in relationship with their customers.
Specifically for Nintendo there are hardware issues around their poor sales (poor support for 3rd party developers and underpowered hardware) – that’s covered extremely well by Paul Tassi on his “Insert Coin” blog on the Forbes website.
But there are deeper issues here and the gaming industry as whole is trying to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of gamers. Gamers are as the author points out an extremely engaged group – they are also extremely vocal, networked and happy to see brands die when they “deserve it” for treating their customers poorly.
Issues that have sprung up a lot are releasing unfinished products at full price (See the Sim City and Battlefield 4 public apologies and lawsuits), overpromising on product quality and under delivery (see the lawsuit against Aliens: Colonial Marines and Bioware developing hours of extra content for their games free as an apology for lying to their fans).
Add to this the rise of the “Indie” game movement – which is just as much a protest movement against the big companies as home vegie patches and farmers markets are a protest movement against Woolworths.
Its an interesting area because gaming companies are presently being taught some very harsh lessons about what happens when consumer trust goes out the window. Quite a few companies are tipped to go belly up in the next couple of years because of this – Nintendo should be fine though as they are sitting on a lot of money from past success, though they more than anyone are presently showing the pitfalls of resting on your laurels.