Games and Niche Marketing

One of the things that I enjoyed most about the ‘rise’ of gaming in the mainstream was the sense that my hobby was now cool. Being a gamer through most of my life, I was often on the fringes of my peers, many of whom used those now-reclaimed, oft-maligned monikers of ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’. Suddenly, gaming was the ‘in’ thing, Halo made more money than Hollywood movies. In this new world, I was now validated.

However, my thoughts on how things would go after the mainstreaming of gaming were a far cry from what it actually turned out to be. Instead of my hobby receiving a social boost and feeling validated, instead, video games as an industry became cynical; toxic online multiplayer games, GamerGate, and Microtransactions, to name a few issues.

Proving immune to attacks from the ‘establishment’, the government, lawyers and angry soccer-moms in moral panic, gaming culture was under a different kind of attack that now came from within, as those of us who had been here from the start now existed in a medium where we felt like outsiders to the very industry that we helped to create.

It was a sad time, as games got released that catered less and less for those of us that had been here from the start, caring more for the cool, gamer-bro crowd that offered lucrative blockbuster sales. Call of Duty and FIFA became the representation of all that was wrong in gaming, and every major company was trying to release ‘me-too’ titles in a desperate attempt to cash-in.

One particular harrowing moment for me was seeing people at school who bullied me for playing Pokemon, smuggling Nintendo DS systems into school and playing them in their groups. It felt hypocritical to see this happen, and as I tried to join in and play these games with the others, I was simply shunted away under a slew of beatings from the cool kids and left outside of the very thing I loved, questioning my whole identity.

Then came the rise of Indie games. Suddenly it was possible to be small and profitable at the same time. Creativity returned to the industry. Some games even found a way to cater for the insiders and still retain popular appeal, Minecraft being the most potent example.

Video games’ hardest challenge was becoming mainstream. Decisions were made in order to court popularity and profitability, to the detriment of the industry at large. We are still suffering from the aftershocks of this, the AAA industry still holding gaming in a powerful claw-like grip with anti-consumer decisions like DRM, DLC and Microtransactions.

However, for gaming to find a way to be sustainable, we should look to the example of niche marketing; not just a term for Business Studies students to remember, but possibly, it is what needs to happen for gaming to continue to step forward.

As an industry becomes mainstream, many smaller companies simply can’t afford to compete with the big boys, in this case EA and Activision are like Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the soft drinks market. Instead, to survive, smaller companies innovate on the formula in a way that caters for a smaller, albeit significant sub-section of the market, like Innocent Smoothies.

Such niches can become large industries unto themselves with their own big boys and underdogs. Survival games are already a potent example of a niche that has become so significant that it has influenced the industry at large; I find a parallel between the acquisition of Mojang by Microsoft, and to the purchase of Innocent Smoothies by Coca Cola.

Both acquisitions were cases of a niche company being snapped up by a big empire as their significance rose to critical mass, and not only that, but just as Mojang’s whole development philosophy seemed to fly in the face of everything Microsoft stood for, so did Innocent Smoothies seem the opposite of the big, ‘bad’ empire of Coca-Cola.

Gaming and soft drinks seem to be two completely separate industries that would never cross paths. But if we take away the type of products that Innocent and Mojang bring to market, ultimately both are just businesses. Gaming is, just like the soft drinks market, an industry, and we can hopefully look to other examples in big business as a sign of the future. If niche markets are success stories for so many other industries, then this leaves an optimistic message as to where gaming, especially indie gaming, is going to go next.