the Gaming Realm™

Trend Watching’s July issue talks about product branding in virtual worlds and online communities. Touching on topics like Escaping to an alternate reality (which was originally the purpose of playing online games), New opportunities for brands, the Best thing to happen to marketers since sliced bread, Numbers, and this and that. It is a very great read and write-up, especially to top executives who will not believe unless they are presented with numbers:

Follow up:

• Habbo Hotel with 50 million members
• Neopets with 70 million+ virtual pet owners
• Coke Studios with 8 million+ registered users
• Virtual Magic Kingdom with 1 million+ registered users
• Goonzu (Korea) with 3 million members
• Guild Wars with 2 million members
• Project Entropia with 400,000 members
• International Ragnarok Online (iRO) with 17 million members
• Second Life with 290,000 members
• World of Warcraft with 5.5 million members

And the semi-YOUNIVERSES, such as:

• MySpace with 68 million members
• MSN Spaces with 30 million+ members
• Cyworld with 17 million members in Korea (which is 3% of population). In China, Cyworld acquired 1.3 million subscribers in only eight months.
• Lunarstorm with 1.2 million+ members in Sweden (which is 10% of population)
• Hyves with 1.6 million members in the Netherlands (which is 10% of population); 400,000+ members in Latin America (mainly Peru)
• Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) with 100 million+ users
• Yahoo! Messenger with 63 million+ users
• QQ Messenger with 150 million+ users in China
• AOL Instant Messenger with 43 million users in the USA

How about quotes?

“Gaming’s great benefit for gamers is escapism, within an alternate reality. Gamers all over the world are looking for the same thing: escapism—the opportunity to participate in an alternate reality. Within this alternate reality, fundamental human desires are satisfied—the drive to explore, with the promise of reward.” (Source: Mediaedge:cia.)

The optimum role for a brand within a game is to enhance the gamer’s sense of escapism, by strengthening the alternate reality experience. This is something that is specific to each game. In a racing game, it could be as simple as an official real-world sponsor’s logo on the side of a car; but a similar logo on a car in a role-playing game might be completely out-of-place. So for best results, this is something that needs to be considered on a game-by-game basis, to identify a role that is specific to a particular place in a particular game.

Sixty percent of trendsetters and 33% of mainstream 14-34 year-olds have a social networking page (source: TrendCentral, May 2006).

So what else? Just read the whole issue by clicking: YOUNIVERSAL BRANDING, bookmark it as well