INTERVIEW PART 1: Roy Bahat on the evolving IGN readership

Roy Bahat, the President of IGN, spoke to MCV recently about how readers are evolving and how IGN is adapting to this change.

With the shift in the gaming demographic continuing to make 'gamers' an ever-broader and difficult to define group, who have IGN's readers become?

Gaming is IGN's anchor. For a long time, sports media has been mainstream, music media has been mainstream and games, despite being as broadly enjoyed as sports or music has yet to become mainstream, and that's the idea.

20% of IGN's readers are 'core' gamers. What does IGN mean by the term 'core' when they differentiate between audience members in this way?

It's defined mostly based on why they play. They play for psychological reasons we associated with gamers in the past, which is escape from reality, mastery over a fantastic world; these are the guys who care about things like frame rate and graphics quality.

Broadly speaking, there are certain kinds of games that have greater appeal to the traditional 'core' gamer, such as Skyrim.

There is a second category which we call the 'socially mainstream' gamers, who are mostly playing Kinect with their friends. Obviously, that's not Skyrim, which is played individually. These are the guys who play Call of Duty with the headset on, or who invite a bunch of friends over to play GTA and they all sit around and watch each other play quests and just hang out. They're playing for a fundamentally different reason and demographically they just tend to be slightly younger, not the traditional 'geek' image, they're the 'everyguy' basically.

There's a third category which we identified called the 'peak influencers' or 'alpha influencers', and these are the guys who everybody else asks for advice about what to play. What's interesting is that they're actually not the traditional 'core' gamers. The traditional gamers play and they have some influence, but there's kind of a super-set of people (not as big), who are well researched on every game, know what's coming out, what's cool, what's not, what's going to be good. 

At IGN, we're lucky enough to over-index with that audience too. So I think the issue as an industry is that we haven't yet caught up with this stuff and still think in terms of 'core' and 'casual', and those distinctions are just kind of bulls@#t, you know?

There's also this issue of legacy going on, with people who'll buy maybe 2 or 3 games per year but don't read much about it. People who bought Duke Nukem Forever because they used to enjoy it back in the day.

Yeah, there are definitely those nostalgic people who used to play on a LAN when they were in uni or high school. As an industry, we haven't caught up with the fact that so many different people play for so many different reasons.

There's a tremendous amount of variety, and I think we're still seeing more of it. Minecraft is one of the most interesting developments in the last few years in gaming, for a million reasons including how they've distributed. What's most interesting about it creatively is that it feels like a different kind of gameplay.

Sure, you can say it feel like Terraria or whatever, but it is engaging with people's desire to play in a fundamentally new way. And it's weird, we went to the first Minecon, and were expecting it to look like Comicon with so many people who are super-geeky and really into it (and there were those people) but there was so many families. There were parents with their kids talking about playing together.

So something like that which looks like it would be a pretty core experience (it's not easy to find or to buy; you've got to buy it in beta off some dude's web site in Sweden), and yet psychologically it appeals to a more mainstream audience.

Games are going to be to the next 20 years what music was to the 60s and 70s, and I don't even think we know what we're in for in terms of the cultural explosion of different kinds of gameplay. I'm surprised that the theme of Occupy Wall Street isn't a game, you know?

Ken Levine said that he went down to the Occupy movement in Boston and took a look around so he could really capture that kind of upheaval for Bioshock Infinite and really nail the vibe.

That's awesome, and Bioshock's a great game!

In Australia, we were just hit with the newspaper headline the other day 'Kids' minds being warped by videogames', with the online version of that headline being 'Games waging war on young minds'.

This is exactly my point. If you go back to the late 60s, was rock and roll not destroying young minds? That was the theme, right? And obviously, that's ridiculous, but any form of cultural expression is scary to people who don't understand it. Part of our goal at IGN is to be a promoter of the best parts of what this industry is and help people to understand it.

That's the role of a lot of web sites, in part. It is possible, however, to get bogged down in being defensive about the medium.

It's just kind of irrelevant. The music industry didn't spend a lot of time debating the people who thought it was destroying young minds, they just made great f@#$ing music. And same thing for games.

We feel really privileged, since we have the biggest audience of gamers in the world, to be able to play a role in evangelising it. Increasingly, one of the themes for us, which ties in to our YouTube stuff, is that we used to think of ourselves as a web site (and obviously we still *are* that, that's our anchor), but increasingly we're just a service that exists on many platforms.

If you went to E3, there was IGN stuff all over the place. We were doing a live event piece and we're doing competitive gaming (a thing called the IGN Pro League) and now YouTube is really our first attempt at long-form big-screen video content, which is just a short step away from television content.

Here in Australia, we've got a weekly page in three newspapers, so the idea is that if we want to be a mainstream evangelist for this space, we have to be everywhere where the audience is. So we've evolved beyond just being a web site to now be on 18 screens.

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