Innovation And Marketing In The Video Game Industry

Video games have had a greater impact on our society than almost any other leisure activity. They not only consume a large portion of our free time, they influence cultural trends, drive microprocessor development, and help train pilots and soldiers. Now, with the Nintendo Wii and DS, they are helping people stay fit, facilitating rehabilitation, and creating new learning opportunities. Innovation has played a major role in the long term success of the video game industry, as software developers and hardware engineers attempt to design products that meet the needs of ever widening segments of the population. At the same time, companies with the most advanced products are often proving to be less successful than their competitors. Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry identifies patterns that will help engineers, developers, and marketing executives to formulate better business strategies and successfully bring new products to market. Readers will also discover how some video game companies are challenging normal industry rules by using radical innovations to attract new customers. Finally, this revealing book sheds light on why some innovations have attracted legions of followers among populations that have never before been viewed as gamers, including parents and senior citizens and how video games have come to be used in a variety of socially beneficial ways. David Wesley and Gloria Barczak's comparison of product features, marketing strategies, and the supply chain will appeal to marketing professionals, business managers, and product design engineers in technology intensive industries, to government officials who are under increasing pressure to understand and regulate video games, and to anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of one of the most important industries to emerge in modern times. In addition, as video games become an ever more pervasive aspect of media entertainment, managers from companies of all stripes need to understand video gaming as a way to reach potential customers.

Use Video Games to Drive Innovation, Customer Engagement, Productivity, and Profit! Companies of all shapes and sizes have begun to use games to revolutionize the way they interact with customers and employees, becoming more competitive and more profitable as a result. Microsoft has used games to painlessly and cost-effectively quadruple voluntary employee participation in important tasks. Medical schools have used game-like simulators to train surgeons, reducing their error rate in practice by a factor of six. A recruiting game developed by the U.S. Army, for just 0.25% of the Army’s total advertising budget, has had more impact on new recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined. And Google is using video games to turn its visitors into a giant, voluntary labor force--encouraging them to manually label the millions of images found on the Web that Google’s computers cannot identify on their own. Changing the Game reveals how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; to supercharge productivity...in short, to make it fun to do business. This book is packed with case studies, best practices, and pitfalls to avoid. It is essential reading for any forward-thinking executive, marketer, strategist, and entrepreneur, as well as anyone interested in video games in general. In-game advertising, advergames, adverworlds, and beyond Choose your best marketing opportunities--and avoid the pitfalls Use gaming to recruit and develop better employees Learn practical lessons from America’s Army and other innovative case studies Channel the passion of your user communities Help your customers improve your products and services--and have fun doing it What gamers do better than computers, scientists, or governments Use games to solve problems that can’t be solved any other way

Involving customers in the development and production of new services becomes a powerful force across many creative industries. Customers can directly supply the firm with innovative ideas, provide skilled labour, and act as a powerful force in marketing. Firms across the world, as they seek to innovate and to better respond to market needs, begin to recognize the benefits stemming from customers’ involvement in their operations. Co-creation also becomes more prevalent as customers begin to expect it from firms – seeking to influence their favourite services or products, and to have them better tailored to their needs. Nevertheless, empowering the customers and involving them in the internal affairs of a firm is both difficult and risky. Despite co-creation becoming increasingly important to firms, very few accounts of it exist and many firms fail. Therefore, to navigate those straits, and to reap the benefits of co-creation, requires knowledge and more complete understanding of socio-cultural forces underpinning it. By studying a wide array of videogames firms in the USA and Europe, this book provides a unique insight into co-creation. It builds on the existing theories to provide unified framework for understanding co-creation in creative industries and other sectors. It combines insights from the dynamics of customer communities, with firm’s perspective on innovation management and organizational transformation. The book offers highly detailed insights into the industry, which is at the forefront of co-creation. Furthermore, it sheds new light on the videogames firms and their operations and is therefore ideally designed for researchers, educators, and students alike in the fields of knowledge management, innovation management, firm strategy, organization studies and creativity management.

The Video Game Industry provides a platform for the research on the video game industry to draw a coherent and informative picture of this industry. Previously this has been done sparsely through conference papers, research articles, and popular science books. Although the study of this industry is still stigmatized as frivolous and ‘only’ game oriented, those who grew up with video games are changing things, especially research agendas, the acceptance of studies, and their interpretation. This book describes and defines video games as their own special medium. They are not pinball from which they grew, nor movies which they sometimes resemble. They are a unique form of entertainment based on meaningful interactions between individuals and machine across a growing sector of the population. The Video Game Industry provides a reference foundation for individuals seriously interested in the industry at the academic level. As a result, this book will serve as a reference in curricula associated with video game development for years to come.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, The FOM University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, language: English, abstract: The intention of this assignment is to figure out if timing strategies are relevant for the innovation process. In case to do this the author took the example of the video game industry to deflect several timing strategies. The choice for the video game industry depended on the high innovation ratio in this industry. Since 1977 at least every year was a new console released which was in handling, performance, or technology different from the ancestor products. The target is the evaluation of timing strategies as a success driver for this industry. The focus lay on the time-to-market timing and the market-entry timing. To come to a result at first the term innovation will be defined. The second step is a description of the innovation process. Out of the innovation process the author will deflect different timing strategies. The next part of the assignment will be a short overview of the video game industry. After that a case study will follow which reflects the release of video game consoles of the last 20 years beyond the aspect of time-to-market and market entry timing. In the end the author will give a conclusion of the treatment of timing strategies in combination with innovations.

This book is the first study to survey, over a ten-year period, innovations and the industrial formation process of online game business, and global strategies of major Korean online game companies. It focuses on the innovative factors which made the Korean online game industry grow tremendously and successfully to gain competitiveness in the global game industry. These include: the main factors stimulating online game business; virtual business created by online games as well as an examination of the role of the Korean government at the beginning and developmental period of the online gaming business.

The video game industry has been one of the fastest-growing cultural phenomena of our times with market conditions that demand a specific skill set from its marketers. To a new generation of "indie gamers", being a game developer isn’t just about design and production, a successful video game demands entrepreneurial skills and astute business acumen. The creators need to know what their customers want, how to reach those customers and how to sell to them. Video Game Marketing: A student textbook is for development students or aspiring developers who want to know how to promote and sell the results of their efforts. This book is a much-needed guide to: • the essentials of marketing strategy; • video games as products or services; • marketing research for game development; • branding video games; • marketing through game: gamification, advergames. Replete with pedagogy to aid learning such as objectives and discussion questions for each chapter, this book is all that aspiring video game developers will need to unleash the potential of their games.