4T2's Top 5 Future Trends in Casual Gaming

Thanks to everyone who attended my recent talk at the Technology World Event. I hope you enjoyed it.

As promised, here are my / 4T2s top five (publishable) Future Trends for Casual Games.

5 - No more “Visit facebook.com/MyBrand”

Hurray! This was getting really boring. A new wave of ‘super APIs’ have been created by companies such as Janrain and Gigya. These allow you to login to a website or game via any of your social network IDs. You can then pull details of your friends and other data from that network to send challenges, publish achievements and generally annoy your boss by playing games and browsing the web when you should be working.

Social networks will become a conduit for passing information, but no longer be the advertised destination. Why would a company want to push potential clients to an environment where competitors can actively market to them? It’s also getting very expensive to advertise games inside Facebook, so the opportunity to generate high volume, low cost traffic there has now gone.

This will make web games BIG, or even bigger anyway. If a Facebook game can generate millions of plays a day, imagine what a Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, YouTube, mySpace, Gmail, Yahoo!, Newgrounds, Kongregate (please integrate these last two!) enabled game can achieve.

4 - Co-operative gaming

This is the most predictable item in our chart, as much of this is happening already. Imagine your friend has kindly spent three weeks building up a super tank in Call of Duty 10. Why sit around with a pistol trying to do the same thing? Either borrow his tank (winning him additional upgrades), rent his tank (allowing him to buy more upgrades) or hire him to help you complete that final level (paying him to buy more upgrades). Both players benefit - everyone’s a winner.

This enables players to achieve one of the key motivations of gaming - showing off how good you are to your friends and peers.

3 – Design-a-gaming

All good games offer the player the ability to personalise the content to some degree, via level builders, avatars, equipment choice and naming privileges.

In the immediate future this will become much more prevalent, with the ability to build the fundamental rules of a sandboxed game yourself. Don’t like FPS? Make your version of our game a platformer instead. Brands will be releasing causal game creation tools with one or two examples built in, allowing users to create their own challenges for their friends. Publish once and get 100,000 games promoting your brand.

Just as importantly, the example game you play will be pre-personalised to your taste. Social networks and blogs will help enable this by scanning your profile to pre-create content that suits your interests.

2 - Throw away your controllers

No one wants to sit down with a mouse and keyboard any more. Look at what virtually every major console manufacturer is currently doing.

Therefore toy companies will without question do the same. Your new Hot Wheels car will be the control device for Mario Carts 6. Want more virtual grip? Change the tyres on your physical toy and presto. This will lead into natural advertising opportunities for consumer goods brands that can give away the optional extras as an incentive to purchase the real product. For example, buy four real Pirelli tyres and get the toy wheels for your son or daughter’s game for free. Want additional fuel for your virtual car? Fill up at a real Exxon forecourt.

Toy based computer gaming, by simplifying the controller and moving it away from a traditional game input device, will also help bring a wider audience to the titles, in the same way the Nintendo Wii introduced the concept of playing games as a family unit.

We foresee any digitally connected device controlling games, from cameras to sat navs.

Note – We are not saying all games here, just a significantly higher percentage.

1 - All games will be free to play

Micro payments, control devices and in game advertising / sponsorship will become so fundamental to the economics of gaming that the majority of content (including console material) will initially be distributed for free. This is the natural extension of try before you buy. Try before you buy, but when you do buy, you are purchasing fully personalised content, tailored to what you want in that game.

Add in cloud based gaming, where you’ll be able to play any game, on any device, at a time that suits you, without having to trudge down to the shops and this argument becomes very persuasive. Companies will be virtually renting out their games for free to hook the public on their titles and then charging to access content like the multiplayer online arenas where the fun really lies.

This obviously has huge impact for high street retailers who are already taking great steps in offering a unique product if you physically purchase a game at their store.

The huge opportunity here is to figure out how a child’s parents will know that they want to purchase a triple bladed, magic enabled sword of doom for Christmas, and offer a simple way of purchasing it. Game or console branded pre paid “credit cards” could become very popular as you’ll still want to hand over something physical. See all of the other entries in this chart for other ideas.

Designagaming has most definitely arrived

In the November 2008 issue of the magazine ‘Brand Strategy’ (RIP) I identified that a growing number of children and teenagers were taking pleasure from creating computer games, as opposed to just playing them.

I then described a potential marketing campaign a brand could run to take advantage of this trend:

“In the gaming world, new software and online tools are making it ever easier for enthusiasts to build their own games with high production values. In the near future I predict this trend will extend towards “Designagaming”. The more adventurous brands will run competitions for the public to create advergames on their behalf. The money previously used for content creation will be switched to prizes for the most successful games and building libraries of assets for willing developers to utilise. Why have one campaign when your target audience can create a hundred different variations, all competing to become your most effective marketing material?”

Nov 2008 Brand Strategy Magazine with Nov 2009 New Media Age
One year later the social gaming website Kongregate has teamed up with the bubblegum brand Stride and done something extremely similar:

“Kongregate and STRIDE® gum are challenging game developers to answer the most epic question of our time: how long can you last?

To answer (and perhaps win our $10,000 first prize) design a Flash game with the theme "endurance". You are free to interpret the theme in any way you like, so get creative! The 15 highest-rated entries will automatically become finalists, winners will judged based on creativity, innovation, use of the theme, and how fun they are to play.”


The site then goes on to list several examples of games that would suit this challenge. Huge respect to Stride for being brave enough to try this marketing strategy and Kongregate for organising it. If anyone has done this before, I’ve certainly missed it.

I’m just sorry that the competition is only open to US residents. I would have really liked to see how game designers from all over the World would have taken to this challenge. I suspect this would have created a much more diverse set of entries as different cultures attempt the same challenge. Perhaps Stride is only sold in the US so they required a US winner for their competition PR.

Turner Media Innovations have also recently launched a designagaming website – Ben 10 Alien Force Game Creator. This site is claiming to have had over 9.5 million plays with over 17,500 games created in just eight weeks. This provides children with a set of prebuilt graphics and a game builder similar to Playcrafter.

Designagaming had definitely arrived. I wonder what some clever marketing type will name this style of campaign?

Designagaming article in Edge Magazine

There's a great five page article in Edge magazine (A UK computer game mag) on Designagaming this month. Well worth a read.

Sandy Duncan (CEO of YoYo Games, formally heading up the Xbox business in Europe for Microsoft) makes some very good comments. I found the part about about game publishers acting like funnels by restricting the flow of ideas interesting. He also notes that Xbox did not want ten different football games all launching at the same time as it would flood the market.

With Designagaming you can take what is there, tweak the game engine to suit your needs, and publish a new version. The nearest thing you will be able to compare it to soon is open source programming languages.

I also like the reference to Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit. Something I spent many hours messing with.

DesignaGaming and Doritos

Turn your Xbox on and go crazy with Doritos (and Dinosaurs!). Similar to the project 4T2 ran for LEGO last year, Doritos challenged their fans to come up with a great new game for them. Entrants sent in their ideas with the top four concpets having a demo proffesionally made. The winner then had their game turned into an Xbox Live game.


For full details check out www.unlockxbox.com

Brilliant. I personally would have had the entrants making the Flash demos (as opposed to sending in their ideas on paper etc) and managed this by sponsoring Newgrounds or Kongregate. This would have given Doritos lots of Flash virals that both advertise their product and promote the competition. Then make an Xbox game out of the most popular. However, as promotions go, this one is extremely good. Great work Doritos and the development agency Ninja Bee.

Designagaming gets a big step closer

Check out www.playcrafter.com. Awesome games creation website. You can very easily imagine a brand creating games on there and challenging the visitors to make their own versions using the assets.

Others to look at include:

Yo Yo Games
Roblox

I promise you - Designagaming will happen soon! If I worked for Spil Group I'd be getting my cheque book out again.