Integration Now: Making Games Safe for Other Media

Electronic Gaming Business, Feb 11, 2004

In another sign that gaming has arrived this past year as a palpable, albeit still puzzling force among major media, the 2004 Media Summit/New York (Feb. 9-10) included a session on the merging of Hollywood, entertainment and games. While gaming was still being relegated to the back of the bus (the last session on the last day of the conference) of this confab among TV, cable, and magazine executives, representatives from Nokia, Sony, AOL, SpikeTV and online MMOG provider Turbine Entertainment explored some of the opportunities and challenges of integrating gaming with other media experiences as the industry still struggles to find better seating in the media express.

From mass media providers like Sony and AOL, women seem to represent a much more substantial force and market than many game publishers recognize. "Online gaming has become mass market," says Matt Bromberg, general manager, AOL Games. "The only true mass market online for years were women ages 30 and up. There are more than 10 million women playing every month on AOL alone and most for at least three hours."

In fact, both Paul Jensen, vp strategic alliances, Sony Pictures Digital Networks, and Nada Usina, general manager/director, entertainment & media, North and South America, NMP Nokia, challenge the misnomer that there is anything "casual" about this segment. "Is it casual if you're playing 15 hours a week of Eucre," asks Usina. While Nokia originally designed and marketed its N-Gage handheld device to hard-core male gamers, Usina says that they have been surprised to discover that these top-end devices are among the biggest sources of simple Java game downloads in some regions, suggesting that it appeals to a broader set of audiences and game tastes than Nokia originally assumed.

Translating the video game experience into other media remains one of the chief challenges for television and broadband networks that want to appeal to the core male gamer. Everyone seemed to agree that this is a work in progress , a code that still needs to be "cracked." "We tried in the Video Game Awards to figure that out," says Albie Hecht, president, Spike TV, "but we haven't yet." Much of the focus continues to be on exploiting the creative assets of gaming, in repurposing characters, animation, and music from games in these other media. Spike TV's sibling cable channel MTV recently experimented with music videos animated with game engines from SSX Tricky and The Sims: Bustin' Out. UPN will soon premiere a series featuring the out-of-game lives of game heroes. Much like advertisers hoping to integrate campaigns more fully with a game, Hecht says he is looking to collaborate with game makers earlier in their creative process so his TV creatives have more time to understand a game's appeal and work its assets into TV entertainment.

While translating the game experience into other media, and pulling other media forms like advertising into gaming, remains in early development, gaming is making strides as an important part of the larger media marketing mix. Bromberg says that AOL is beginning to find better ways of integrating console video game information into the broader programming mix necessary for its audiences. Hardcore video and PC gaming information is not appropriate for this mass audience. AOL has learned to treat video games much like new DVD releases. "We use the game as the starting point but not the core," says Bromberg. The day before the release of NBA Live, for instance, AOL offered an audio stream of a music single from the game and garnered three-quarters of a million streams in 24 hours. AOL is looking for the entertainment value surrounding the game, music, clever footage, interviews, demos, that appeal even to audiences that aren't going to buy the game. "As [gaming] becomes more mass, this will be a more important vein to mine," says Bromberg.

Integrating film and games made great strides this year with The Matrix and Lord of the Rings tie-ins, says Anderson, president/CEO, Turbine Entertainment, which is developing the Middle Earth property online. "This generation is much better at leveraging the film assets...to put the player in the center of the world," says Anderson. The next challenge is to get the licensors to open up their brands to something more than game reiterations of an IP.

Both revenue and retail models for gaming are not set in stone, according to these major players, and there are a lot of models being borrowed from other media. Matt Ringel, president, Games Media Properties, which runs the Game Riot events series, says that his company will soon be experimenting with fee-based ticketed events involving video games.

Game executives voiced some concern about the wisdom and effectiveness of exploiting games too quickly as ad vehicles. "We burned consumers with advergaming," says Bromberg. "They were advertising, not games."

Jensen argues that for free casual games online, some elaborate and highly intrusive ad campaigns have and can work both for advertisers and gamers. As well, ad placements in video game sports settings only add to the realism of the game. But even he admitted that he didn't want to see ads penetrate his Halo experience. Bromberg, who after all works for Time Warner, conceded that the penetration of advertising much more deeply into games of all sorts may be inevitable.