AGDC08: Measuring & Metrics

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Sep 152008
 

Measuring & Metrics: the Online Gaming Audience, Edward Hunter, Comscore

(these are just rough notes, not a liveblog transcript).

Gamers used to be 18-24 males, now there are online gamers in every demographic. Exponential increase in spend for advertising to reach the gamer. 9 out of ten calls to ComScore are about ads.

Metrics asked for:
– reach and frequency
– genre prefs by demographic
– market size
– demographics: ideal targets for a game
– exposure targets — how many did you reach, what is the kind & level of engagement? What actions do they take? (Do they interact with the ad or just see it there but focus more on the game?)
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Another games picture from Target

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Aug 282008
 

Kim's surprised by the giant PC game rack that has 1/3 casual titles and 1/3 adventure games

Holy balls! Look at the PC game shelf! Approx 1/3 traditional PC hardcore fare (not shown), 1/3 kids & adventure (e.g. Dora, Nancy Drew, etc – also not shown) and 1/3 $20 casual download titles.

…on pampers, programming & pitching manure: Evolution of retail

See now, what have I been saying? 🙂

Though when I point this out (as I did most recently in my criminally underreported, one of the best talks I have ever given, go watch the video now Sandbox/Web3d speech), I usually focus on adventure games, not the casual games.

The point is the same though — a misread of what the average consumer is purchasing. Target has plenty of data on this, they make their living from it. First fact: the PC rack is large, despite what anyone may say about PC gaming dying. And what they stock tilts pretty heavily towards game cards, adventure games, and casual games.

If you do venture into the “core games” shelves, by the way, what you find is that there are two shelves of Sims stuff, two shelves of Blizzard stuff, and a smattering of current popular titles.

SIGGRAPH Web3d/Sandbox keynote

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Aug 082008
 

If you are attending SIGGRAPH in LA over the next few days, I am doing a “joint keynote” for the Sandbox games event and the Web3d Symposium tomorrow (I think that means you can get in regardless of which of those two you registered for). It was kind of challenging coming up with a topic that would fit both, until I realized that they’re kind of converging.

Putting the World in World Wide Web

It’s been predicted for a long time that the Web would go “3d.” But many of our predictions about the Internet have been wrong. As a class, the digerati predicted interactive libraries, not MySpace; 3d navigation of sites, not widgets. Users have a habit of taking the best-laid architectural plans and turning them inside out, developing different uses for our closely held technological dreams.

So what is actually happening? Games and social media are converging at a rapid rate, and our whole digital world is about to be reinvented via new technologies that are just now starting to be commercialized. Come take a glimpse into a possible future — one that is almost certainly wrong in many details, but is at least extrapolated from today’s events, rather than old dreams.

E3 MMO movement

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Jul 152008
 
XBox Live avatars

XBox Live avatars and new dashboard

From here, it sure like the virtual world-ish convergence that has long been predicted is hitting the consoles in earnest.

  • XBox Live is adding avatars, akin to the Nintendo Miis, but it looks like they’ll have a bit more spatiality and multiplayer interaction to them — and will be the basic interface for XBL from now on. Oh, and remember when I commented that consoles were turning into PCs? They announced the ability to install games to the hard drive as a major advance. Heh.
  • Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game is also drifting towards online-world land, though still not truly massive in scale.
  • Club Penguin is jumping to the Nintendo DS, and don’t underestimate Disney’s new DGamer service, which is intended to network all the Disney online properties.
  • Sony has a 256-player action game coming, which qualifies as “massive,” certainly, though perhaps not as presistent. They’re also adding more real-world integration, with stuff like movie and TV downloads, weather service, news, etc.

Some misc links

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Jul 072008
 
  • Oh look, another 3d engine in Flash.
  • EA and Hasbro have gotten around to launching a legit Scrabble on Facebook. But Scrabulous appears undaunted.
  • Once in a long ago, I half-heartedly suggested to Gordon Walton that the way to fix the SWG Correspondents program was to have them be player-elected. We never pursued it; the concern was always that they would feel that they would have the right to dictate policy and development priorities, thus taking away control from the dev team. Today, we see that EVE’s council gets covered in the New York Times. As a curiosity, for now — can the day when equivalent deliberations generate mainstream news be far behind?
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