Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi opened the inaugural DICE Europe today by calling on the game industry to join together and help break down negative perceptions to reach – and exceed – revenues of $200 billion by 2016.
A huge total, but one achievable if we collectively redefine where games stand in society, he said. Kislyi believes that games are not just part of a wider entertainment industry; we’re battling for people’s attention and spare time, and we should be comparing playing games with a far broader range of leisure pursuits. Beyond duking it out with film and music, we should consider games as competing with nights out at the pub.
“We have to find our own place in this world and understand what we’re about,” said Kislyi as he reached his session’s central idea: “We are in the time killing business.”
He suggested that the ‘time killing’ market held a rough total value of $2 trillion, and placed in that context, our industry should be aiming to earn at least $200 billion in a year. He also took time to lament current predictions placing annual industry growth at a measly six per cent, suggesting that the trade should display a great deal more ambition.
Teasing out the fag-packet maths a little further, he took some recent research from Newzoo which suggests that the world has 1.2 billion active players – that’s one in seven people – and said that if the industry took 50 cents from each of them over the 365 days in each year, that golden $200 billion would be exceeded with ease.
Wargaming’s World Of Tanks.
Kislyi has a plan to get there, too. Working with bankers and investors would be a good start; “they’ll pump billions into Greek bonds but they won’t fund the next Candy Crush Saga,” he quipped, as he called on those present to use games like Clash Of Clans and Puzzle & Dragons as examples of the kind of investments these institutions are missing out on.
He offered a little of his wisdom from World Of Tanks’ breakthrough business model, too, suggesting that serving niches well can be incredibly lucrative if game makers think on a global scale. Game marketing also has to get smarter; Kislyi described some of the trade’s poorer efforts as an “unforgivable waste of money,” and instead urged marketers to harvest data on players, updating practices to take in and utilize Facebook’s social graph. “Imagine is we could strike a deal with the NSA,” he joked.
These ideas fed into what Kislyi feels should be our main goal – changing perceptions of the game industry into something more positive. “We have to become missionaries and go on a pro-active crusade,” he said, suggesting that the execs at DICE carve out time in their schedules to give interviews to local and national media, meet local politicians and work with charities and communities to further the industry’s cause.
Succeed in that, and “we are going to be looking at a huge, ever growing, blue ocean opportunity,” Kislyi said.
He even added that we could “shred all of our enemies into pieces” if we pull together as an industry – a fittingly combative call to arms from the CEO of Wargaming, and one which inspired and entertained in equal measure.
The post ‘We must unite to change industry perceptions’ – Wargaming’s $200 billion battleplan appeared first on Edge Online.
Source http://www.edge-online.com/features/we-must-unite-to-change-industry-perceptions-wargamings-200-billion-industry-battleplan/
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