Our Fun Future
Gabe Zichermann looks at the challenges to our industry of non-gaming games...
Gabe Zichermann is an author and public speaker who has coined the term 'Funware' to describe the use of game mechanics in non-game contexts. He is co-author of the books "Game-Based Marketing" and "Funware in Action", which look at the use of games and game mechanics in everyday life, the web and business.
Gabe is the CEO of professional mobile social networking startup beamME where he's working to bring fun to every aspect of interpersonal business. A native of Canada and resident of New York City, his musings about games and the world can be found on his personal blog.
A Changing Landscape
The games industry is in the throes of a tectonic shift. Over the past ten years, from revenues of nearly zero, three entire industries have emerged on the periphery of 'traditional' videogames.
Casual, mobile and social-network games have burst onto the scene and are each generating revenues that exceed the core games industry at similar points in its gestation, and each has spawned at least one major player whose aspirations clearly exceed EA's.
And regardless of how you handicap the outcome, successive entrants have become progressively more efficient at generating revenue on a per-employee basis than anything before it, raising the capital efficiency of great games to astronomical levels.
GDC, DICE and other events this year seemed dominated by the pitched battles between the forces of good and evil. Since my first job in the industry as marketing director for GDC/Gamasutra/Game Developer Magazine in the late Nineties, each season has brought some new bugaboo, an us-versus-them for the ages.
In that time alone, it's been Microsoft, downloadable games, Korea, the US Congress, streaming, Nintendo, Apple, China, Facebook and Zynga. The actors change, but the story always seems the same - the new trend is either our devil or our salvation.
These are, without a doubt, interesting times. And they are about to get even complex.
Parallel Concept
On the horizon, beyond the spectre of a Zynga IPO is a fascinating trend that I've been watching for nearly five years. With increasing frequency, companies of all kinds are getting into the business of fun. Most of them come from industries completely devoid of the stuff, eschewing the word games even as their methods, objectives and output are increasingly indistinguishable from games themselves.
As I discovered during the research for my new book, "Game-Based Marketing", companies as large as Chase, United Airlines and the US Army have been experimenting (usually successfully) with the use of game mechanics in parallel to their more traditional marketing and advertising efforts.
Similarly, a wave of enthusiastic start-ups - cutting across a wide swath of industry verticals - is deeply, madly and truly in love with game mechanics. Foursquare, Gowalla, Miso, Yelp and even Facebook are getting in the game.