Community Advertising

April 28, 2006 on 10:01 pm | In Playstyles, Industry

In what I thought was going to be my last entry about it, I was wondering if ingame advertising in the short term was mostly going to be something developers and publishers used on a game that needed to be saved through the incorporation of a new revenue stream.

But with this entry by Raph on Wednesday, I’m now wondering if we’re moving beyond just ingame advertising, into a broader field. The entry, and the comments that follow, started focusing on what Raph referred to as “the online gamer as an addressable audience in its own right”. We know this audience has long existed, but the point now is that large companies, as in a whole bunch of non gaming specialists, also see this audience.

I am no expert on research, but it seems to me that the online gamer is not so much a demographic as they are a psychographic group capable of sampling. We think a certain way, act a certain way, travel in certain places and do so differently across many sub-groups.

There are many people who do not like being categorized, who meet such thinking with revulsion. But the truth is that there are commonalities between everyone, or we wouldn’t have societies and all the trappings. It’s up to companies to understand who their target audience is, and to deliver stuff that audience wants or can be made to want.

To me, these moves by Microsoft and Viacom are the surest signs that online gaming has matured as a business arena. These companies are not buying Massive nor XFire because they want to get into ingame advertising or forum sig-line banner advertising. They’re doing so to add these channels of advertising to their already considerable base of options.

They’ve recognized the installed base of individuals already interested in these types of things, or willing to accept them, as a specific target for messaging. As providers, Microsoft and Viacom (and Time Warner’s GameTap) can offer advertisement services traditional advertising companies don’t have.

And they wouldn’t have bothered getting into this arena if they didn’t think there were growth opportunities for it.

To me, this is the surest sign that online game has “arrived”. Any new thing always has the cutting-edge thinkers and their cadre of followers. Massive online games have been like for this for awhile now, with industry idols followed by groupies through a long series of titles released more because they could be done at all than whether they were the right things to do from the standpoint of generic business rationale.

Now we’re in the business rationale period. Games just cost so much money they can’t really be released without significant backing. Since there’s very few self-made autonomous zillionaires out there, everyone has to get money from somewhere else. Being a competitive field, it’s not like leading companies developing AAA titles can leech off of the monetary success other leading companies have had. There’s no way Mythic is going to ask Blizzard for a loan. So each company is forced to look outside the industry, even beyond ancillary industries, into the vast unknown of entities that exist mostly for money, regardless of where it comes.

Or, into the arena of non-gaming specialists.

Success is a double-edged sword. When an idea becomes successful, the creators want to maintain their hold on it. But the more successful it becomes, the more likely it’ll draw the attention of others, people who want to draw from that success for their own separate purposes. Inevitably, the latter group, the non-specialist momentarily-interested profit seekers become the larger group, either in terms of raw size, or in terms of financial weight. Ultimately, they drive the decision making. It’s not about the experience anymore, but about driving higher margins on it, capitalizing on previous innovation, monetizing the creativity in new ways.

Creativity itself, unfortunately, is expensive. It’s not just the money though. It’s the fact that there’s really no way to measure it. In largish companies, what isn’t measured is constantly argued. In smallish companies, they have to be able to continually justify their funding. This is one of the main reasons the vast majority of conversations in the entertainment industry is not about what someone is thinking. It’s about what they are doing. Oh sure, people will argue that when a game is on paper, in Alpha or in Beta, developers are constantly airing their thoughts to their fanbase, gaining feedback in a collaborative lovefest of hive mind creativity. But that’s nowhere near the full story. Players, fans, anyone who pays to play an end product is an end user. The developers, and the publishers, are on the front line, building this stuff while managing other inputs as well.

Gamers can mock Focus Groups, other forms of qualitative and quantitative research, press coverage from mass media and all that. But these are the tools of the non-specialist. They represent methods by which a vast array of people can talk a common language. They are critical in many fields, including those where the average person doesn’t see their presence.

There’s been many discussions in the last few years about how Gaming has no common language. My concern with such thinking is that with the creation of a common language, “reviews” become the purview of people who created that language. Formalized critique can benefit mediums of expression because it allows for more focused thinking. Unfortunately, one downside associated with focused thinking is that the dialect of Thinkers doesn’t always translate to the vernacular of Doing. This is why there’s such an expression as “Ivory Tower”. When Thinking does not take into account the realities of Doing, the result is the loss of any common evolution.

A good example is Movie Reviews. There’s a growing trend that the arguably “b-rate” movies (ie, movies that target a teen-audience with formulaic spagetti-esque toilet-humour comedy) are not even sending their screeners to the professional movie reviewers anymore. The reviews are a foregone conclusion. Pull out a Mad Libs book and insert all sorts of high mucky muck commentary about a movie not designed for the middle aged movie reviewer two generations off from the demographic. Some could point to this as an example of the movie reviewing “industry” being out of touch with certain aspects of the public.

Nobody is a beautiful snowflake. Success requires execution. Even people who get onto the pure speech/pontification circuit had to start somewhere. Yet, with the rise of Thinking can come the rise of such people or groups who think they’re “above” it all, above the “masses”, above the very people who are their constituency. Heck, I see this thinking just from gamers, some who think there’s a natural progression from learning a game to discussing a game to discussing games in general to becoming jaded about them and discussing their hate.

But that just moves this group beyond relevance as a demographic and psychographic. They are not the target. They do not fit profiles of the mass audience. They are not worth designing games for because they’re not happy, not big enough, whatever. In the end, their role as an important member of a paying subscription base is minimized.

When companies buy up other companies to increase their channels of advertising, they’re not doing so to talk to small groups of veterans. They’re doing so because they either see a huge mass market already, or see the trends that result in that mass market. It’s normal advertising across a lot of spectrums with enough connections between them to form a specific target.

So in the end, I see these moves as meaning online gaming has matured. There are more people who haven’t played UO, EQ1 and AC1 than are currently playing WoW and GW. There are so many new people to this genre the very definition of “massive” has changed. “Online gaming” is a vague umbrella for everything from Flight of the Hamsters to Second Life, from the contrived single player lightly competitive game to worlds that require players build them, on cellphones, PSPs, consoles and PCs.

The next step in evolution is for sub-groups within “online games” to redefine themselves, yet again. Will MMORPGs be a sub-group unto itself? I don’t know. For years I’ve wondered how people could say ATITD is in the same genre as Air Warrior. How is that possible? They’re completely different experiences, both mentally and physically.

But I do know that commonalities do exist. Maybe it’s obvious. Maybe it’s just that there’s online communities at all, vast arenas for massive conversations about the very breadth of titles available for play. Maybe it’s everything from Vault to Guild boards, from instant messaging to text messaging. Maybe that’s the appeal of something like XFire to Viacom, where a tool that can work across so many games has been used by so many types of gamers.

This is not my specialty. I do not understand market forces nor sociology beyond the immediate. But I think it’s important to understand this trend, particularly for those who aren’t being talked to anymore.