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It can be argued that the rise of the social/casual/gamifi cation trend is this
very evolutionary reinvention. However, the main question then becomes:
are these trends suitable for the business/marketing/content strategies of the
industry spiral previously described? How much of the hardcore subcul-
tural industry is adaptable to a global mainstream market based on casual
freemium smartphone titles? The industry faces a huge transformation if it
is to continue expanding its market.
Marketing/Communication Dimension—
Understanding the Mainstream
The game industry has been lauded as being notoriously radical, hyped,
energetic and revolutionizing in your face marketing, personifying the
ideal commodity in post-Fordist/post-modern/promotional capitalism
where Mario acts as global media colonizer in the perpetual revolution of
marketing and advertising (Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2003).
This may indeed be true considering how the game industry has managed
to expand the medium from nothing to tens of billions in revenues in a
matter of few years. However, as described previously when discussing
the hardcore gamer paradigm—has the game industry truly understood
the mainstream, women, senior gamers and developing markets? Is it a
fact of nature that these groups, that constitute majority of society, are
simply not that particularly keen on games, or has the industry been unre-
sponsive when addressing these target groups? All global cultural indus-
tries have a universal reach—for instance, fi lm is extremely fl exible and
able to adapt to local cultures, age-groups, contexts and genres. Although
there is a lack of a truly global fi lm culture (with the dubious exception of
Hollywood) the fi lm medium cannot be considered codifi ed to a special
subculture, nation, gender or age-group. Is it possible to state the same
about the video game medium?
So, how does the industry change its strategic marketing, communica-
tion, product development and content innovation in the face of a non-
initiated mainstream audience? Numerous attempts have been launched by
industry, and also academia. To mention some of the most prominent: seri-
ous, episodic, casual, mobile, social games or online/digital distribution.
Most of these have failed. Others are based on paradoxical self-patronizing
notions (why are entertaining games not “serious”?). With the rise of Web
2.0, social networking and smartphones we have seen a major infl ux of
casual games (targeted towards non-hardcore gamers) and social gaming
which piggybacks social networks (predominantly Facebook) to facilitate
distribution and word-of-mouth/viral marketing mechanisms. Valuations,
IPOs and hype around the explosive growth of social gaming is indeed
impressive—but there are multiple signs of a valuation bubble (Fahey 2011)
as illustrated by the social gaming powerhouse Zynga 's US$10 billion valu-
ation, making it bigger than traditional game industry titans such as EA
 
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