It was quite exciting to follow the launch of the latest installation in the Call of Duty franchise last November. Apparentely upon its release it sold a whopping 4.7 million copies within 24 hours, world wide.
To me this is proof that gaming is now one of the most popular (and most certainly the highest grossing) form of entertainment and that this is only the start. This validates gaming as a principal form of spending our freetime, gaming now forms a significant part of our lives.
And it’s not only videogaming that soared. In 2009 gaming all of sudden started to make a lot of noise as web and mobile apps as well.
A couple of examples:
- The wild success that Zynga and its genius implementation of virtual goods inside Facebook has had this year. The Japanese, the Koreans and the Finns (Habbo comes to mind) has for quite a while now had successful businesses monetizing virtual goods but Zynga introduces this to the US and I believe it is more important then we think. (Even though it seems dangerous to base your business upon another business. What stops Facebook from starting their own FarmVille? My prediction; Zynga will get bought by Facebook and then Facebook goes public).
- Foursquare and its fantastic (re)introduction of power-ups. (the badges). and its recently hatched competitor Gowalla are other examples (and judging by their latest round of investing where every high-profile angel seems to have fought for a piece of the action, there seems to be others who think that gaming and geolocation has a bright future.
These developments makes me think that in the next couple of years companies will start integrating a “layer of gaming” to their solutions. I believe that by redesigning and recontextualizing tedious tasks to form part of a greater gaming experience companies can bump up their conversion and fidelization rates. (Think applications like DailyBurn or why not Basecamp?)
It would be great to see more companies experiment with this. I know I will.
2010 looks to be poised as the year when gaming starts to play a larger role.
