MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
This year’s London Games Conference on November 19th will have a number of high profile speakers from around the games industry sharing their knowledge.
Ahead of the event, Nick Parker of Parker Consulting tells us why marketers need to step outside of their comfort zone to push games.
For the unaware, who are you and what do you do?
I am a strategic planning consultant who has worked in the industry for 22 years, first with Nintendo, then with Sony and finally in the last 12 years running Parker Consulting, the go-to consultancy for research, business planning and strategic services as well as funding.
Tell us a bit about your talk at LGC. Don’t just tell us the title – what is it really about?
Being a numbers man, my brief at conferences is to pull delegates forward in their seats in order to absorb key take-aways of the games industry. This year, I’ll be discussing marketing across the industry from packaged goods to PC digital to mobile with an abundance of metrics to show how, despite a shorter value chain, marketing remains a significant cost even in the digital world.
What are the biggest challenges currently affecting the way games are marketed?
The function of marketing is to expose your game to as many people as you can afford to. The increase in the addressable market for games and the broadening of demographics now demands sharper marketing strategies at a cost, similar, in terms of a share of revenues, to the expensively developed core packaged goods games. The resultant challenge of this is educating indie developers in the appreciation of the overall cost to get their work to market rather than just the development of the code.
What single area of games marketing should we pay attention to in 2015 – and why?
I’m not sure there is a single area of marketing to pay attention to in 2015. Marketers on any platform, traditional or digital, need to explore and experiment with new media rather than working within their comfort zones and wasting valuable marketing budgets. We see a number of well executed marketingcampaigns that fuel the imagination, primarily online, and that find the target market more efficiently than buying TVRs in the peak season. There is a growing group of online communities such as Twitch, Buzzfeed, Twitter and Snapchat which should beconsidered in the media mix.
