State Of Play: How Gaming Conquered Culture and What It Means For Marketing
One of the most sizable shifts in consumer behavior over the past year has been the growth of gaming. Video games are now a bigger industry than movies and North American sports – combined. Life in lockdown accelerated the already rapid rise of gameplay by 45% in 2020 alone, pushing video games to replace music as the most important aspect of youth culture. The implications for brands are profound giving rise to creative new ways of engaging consumers to drive growth and deepen loyalty.
Culture Shift
The elusive Gen Z male has found a home in gaming whether it's playing alone, with friends, or watching livestreams. In 2020 gaming grew beyond this core segment, as women now comprise almost half of all players and 64% of US adults play games for 7 hours a week on average. Even Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sees gaming as a formidable mass-market competitor to binge watching saying, "We compete with, and lose to, Fortnite more than HBO."
This marks a significant shift in culture as Trevor McFedries, the co-founder of Brud (the studio behind CGI influencer, Lil Miquela), noted in a recent tweet: “Gaming is replacing music as the lynchpin of emergent social scenes and it makes everyone 30+ I talk to really uncomfortable.” Sports has also taken a back seat to gaming evidenced by Morning Consult's report that Swedish YouTuber and gamer PewDiePie has the same name recognition and higher favorability than LeBron James. Questions among marketing professionals are shifting as well. It's no longer a question of if gaming makes sense, but how to most effectively bring it into the mix.
Digital Dopamine
With a variety of entry points, gaming and gamified experiences helped to boost brand intimacy rankings by a record 23% last year, and it's only the beginning. These repeated experiences create reward cycles in the brain that build loyalty and trust, signaling opportunities for future-focused brands to incorporate play as a serious part of their digital strategy. With 68% of Gen-Z men saying gaming is an important part of their identity, it's clear video games can be a direct route to deeper consumer connections.
Brands as broad-reaching as Balenciaga, Cadillac, Marc Jacobs, Gucci, White Claw and Valentino among others have experimented with gaming recently. A smart move considering consumers with stronger emotional connections to brands often spend more and are less price sensitive. While there are a myriad of ways to integrate gaming into omnichannel efforts, Twitch is rising as the primary platform.
Twitch Takes Over
Originally launched as Justin.tv in 2007, Twitch has grown to become the top live stream gaming platform globally with 85% market share. Game streaming viewership nearly doubled during the pandemic as a socially distanced communal experience with Twitch seeing 90% of all growth compared to game streaming on YouTube and Facebook Games. Globally, Twitch now has 145 million monthly users, 25.6 million daily users and streams 1.6 billion hours of live streams every month. This keeps users on the platform for an average of 39.7 minutes per visit. For comparison, this is 4x higher than Tiktok, almost double the time spent on YouTube and 501% more time than Facebook.
Half of Twitch's users are 18-34 years old and primarily male, while young users (13-17 years old) comprise 21% of the base. The majority of these high-value segments are constantly connected and open to engaging with and buying from brands they see on the platform. Interestingly, the multi-hyphenate archetype of both Gen Z and millennial consumers is reflected in the content they seek out on the platform. Non-gaming categories like talk shows, music, art, sports, cooking and beauty are some of the fastest-growing. Chess for example grew by 4x in 2020 alone, powered in part by the pandemic and the Netflix hit The Queen's Gambit. Even analog classics like Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting have found new audiences on Twitch which streams episodes from the television series to 1.7 million subscribers.
Beauty In The Banter
If hashtag challenges are TikTok's special sauce, livestream sponsorships are Twitch's superpower. Organic conversations that arise in gameplay are the brand moments to aim for – and often extend across the gaming ecosystem. With the average stream lasting 3-6 hours and some exceeding 12 hours, there is plenty of time for conversations to flow beyond the game at hand. Through integrating Twitch functionality like branded emotes (prized emojis used in live chat) or creating promotions that reward desired actions with bits (Twitch's form of currency) the platform provides a number of ways to generate authentic conversations and build brand relevancy. Twitch is focused on the future as well, becoming a popular platform for v-streamers which are livestreamers in full-body motion capture suits. This creates an animated overlay allowing streamers to appear like animojis of limitless design that you can interact with in real-time.
Bringing the banter beyond Twitch is the ultimate power move. Wendy's now-classic Fortnite campaign started with their employees destroying freezers in the game (to communicate their disdain for frozen meat), which they then streamed through Twitch driving word of mouth across social and generating millions in earned media. All without spending a dime. The rise of emerging chat communities like Discord provides additional off-Twitch opportunities for giveaways and more intimate consumer engagement between streamers and their top fans.
This article originally appeared in the February 9th, 2021 issue of Moving Image & Content’s agency newsletter. Register here to subscribe.