‘You want to be the brand’: As games become a driver of fandom and media consumption, individual creators wield the most influence

Gaming is no longer at the periphery of popular culture.

Traditionally, video games have often sat downstream from other types of media, with their consumption and fandom driven by more mainstream forms of entertainment. The James-Bond-inspired GoldenEye 007, for example, was the all-time third-best-selling game for the Nintendo 64, trailing behind only the powerhouses that were Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64.

These days, the script has been flipped. Games and their attendant fan bases are a valuable source of intellectual property and revenue in their own right, sometimes driving the consumption of non-gaming media.

In November 2021, the League-of-Legends-based “Arcane” became the most-watched English-language series on Netflix; in 2020, “Sonic the Hedgehog” drew over $300 million in ticket sales, becoming the most successful feature film to ever be based on video-game IP. Esports viewership has also skyrocketed, with viewership of the 2021 League of Legends World Championship Finals reaching a record-high average minute audience of over 30 million in November.

“Game developers are spinning up world-class IP that stands toe-to-toe with comic-book characters,” said Scott Smith, co-founder of gaming and esports production company Do Not Peek Entertainment. “It used to be that they’d make a movie, and then they’d make a shitty spin-off video game, right? Right now, they make a world-class video game, and they spin off a world-class set of IP that goes alongside it — that lives on Netflix, that lives in other places.”

This rise in gaming activity has been marked by a corresponding increase of interest in the space coming from both endemic and non-endemic brands. “We see brands partnering up with gamers to make something special, like the partnership with Mountain Dew and [Jack] “CouRage” [Dunlop] — they’re competing with G FUEL, which is a native gaming brand, to create a drink just for gamers,” said Josh “Caru” Glodoveza, vp of talent for the creator-powered apparel company Fanjoy. “Historically, G FUEL has made supplements and energy drinks for gamers, but now we see a big, triple-A brand going into our community and picking out celebrities and creators.”

Indeed, it’s more important than ever for brands and marketers to understand why and how people play the games they do — and it’s become apparent that individual streamers and creators wield a tremendous amount of influence on modern gamers’ opinions and activity.

The inflection point for this increase in creator power was the release of the battle royale title Apex Legends, according to Jason Baker, Smith’s co-founder at Do Not Peek Entertainment.

“Here’s a game that nobody was expecting, nobody knew about it. And all of a sudden, 20 of the most famous, popular streamers in first-person shooters are all playing this game, and the game exploded off of that — I mean absolutely exploded,” Baker said. “That changed everything, because they said, ‘we don’t have to put billboards up; we don’t have to put ads in magazines; we don’t have to do that. We can release like this, and everybody’s on board, …read more

Source:: Digiday