Marketing of Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 43

and many other rooms containing tabletop computers are potential portals
to digital worlds of fun and leisure; the processing speed of the computers
are made to support building pixels of action heroes and cars instead of
mere mundane utilities for practical matters. On top of this, mobile tech-
nologies have enabled video games to be played at any conceivable spaces as
both computer platform and Internet connection are no longer dependent
on a fi xed location (see Feijoó's chapter on mobile gaming in this volume),
e.g. subways, classrooms, meeting rooms, the local grocery store and many
more. Whether or not we have chosen to be part of it, today we live in a
society that is heavily gamifi ed (see Flavio's chapter in this volume) and
no matter if we consider ourselves to be a gamer—our lives are heavily
af ected by video games.
Contrary to what seems to be a common public view, that the persons
playing video games (also known as gamers) are exclusively teenage boys,
the average age of a gamer is more than thirty years old and almost half
of the gamers are female. For example, statistics from the Entertainment
Software Association (ESA), 2 a U.S. industry organization, show that the
average age of the U.S. gamer is thirty-seven (18 per cent under eighteen
years, 53 per cent eighteen to forty-nine years, 29 per cent fi fty-plus years)
and 42 per cent of the gamers are female. Although these data are only one
example, from one region of the world, it is very likely that the average
age of gamers will be as high in other regions in industrialized countries.
The reasons for the high average age are both the increased availability of
enabling technologies and changes in gaming culture. Keep in mind that
the fi rst generation that had access to video games, on a larger scale, was
born in the early 1970s (Herz 1997; Pool 2000). With the penetration of
video game arcade machines in game parlours and the introduction of the
home computer, these kids—also known as Generation G (Beck and Wade
2004)—grew up playing video games. At the same time as every generation
thereafter has adopted playing games, Generation G has continued to play
games. Thus driving up the average age and changing the purchase patterns
as this group has a high purchase power.
This chapter is about the marketing of video games. In writing this chap-
ter we opted to take a segmentation(al) foothold in the persons playing
video games, the consumers—gamers. Because, in the end, these are the
persons that games intend to attract. What one will notice throughout this
chapter is that despite that this industry is viewed as a creative industry
(Tschang 2007; Tschang and Szczypula 2006; Zackariasson forthcoming;
Zackariasson, Styhre and Wilson 2006), marketing ef orts are still fol-
lowing a traditional and rather uncreative pattern. Nevertheless, there are
ample opportunities in promotion of games, of ered by technical possibili-
ties of the product. These opportunities have, as we will describe in the end
of the chapter, of ered new and interesting ways for both the video game
industry, and other industries, to communicate with potential consumers.