Middle School Marketing: Gaming Is Growing
This month's Middle School Marketing we set out to talk about geo-based marketing, but instead found ourselves discussing gaming and its long term viability.
One thing is certain: gaming isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's growing and it's growing fast. And it's not just black-t-shirt-and-square-rimmed-glasses-wearing-with-dirty-facial-hair-stuck-in-their-mom's-basement-playing-WOW nerds. Gaming is invading reality, and everyone is playing:
- As of today, Farmville has 83,105,118 active monthly users and Mafia Wars has 25,080,678. Seriously?
- Farmville has more players than Twitter has accounts
- Two and a half years ago, Disney purchased Club Penguin for $350M - a game which at the time boasted 12 million accounts, 700,000 paid subscribers, and $40M in annual revenue. I'm sure the numbers are exponentially larger now
- As of February 20th, PlayStation has 20M users worldwide and Xbox Live has generated $1 billion dollars since its 2002 launch
- MyTown recently hit one million users after only two months in existence. And let's not forget about Gowalla and Foursquare, and Causeworld
- Gameloft brought in $170M in iPhone App Store revenue - and that's just one company
Not only is gaming not going anywhere; you can expect to see elements of gaming incorporated into just about everything - or so says Jesse Schell, owner of Schell Games and Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. In his talk, "Is Your Life Just One Big RPG - Design Outside The Box" at the 2010 DICE Summit, Jesse hypothesizes that beyond the fun element of gaming, it's actually the psychology behind gaming that makes it so appealing.
Here's Jesse's talk broken into three parts, and it is absolutely incredible. It is worth the 25 minutes, I promise (thanks to Nicholas for this find):
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