• by Doug Chavez , Columnist, June 12, 2014

 “I got a pocket full of quarters and I’m headed to the arcade.

I don’t have a lot of money but I’m bringing everything I made.

I’ve got a callus on my finger and my shoulder’s hurting, too.

I’m gonna eat them all up, just as soon as they turn blue.

’Cause I’ve got Pac-Man fever”

I was never any good at Pac Man but I usually got extended play and high score on Dragon’s Lair and Donkey Kong. 

This week was E3, the annual over-the-top gaming event. If you have ever been, you know the event is a near-epileptic sensory overload, with enough caffeine- and sugar-laced drinks to make any hard core gamer wide eyed for months. And under all the flashing lights, scantily clad pixies in the booths and walking the massive show flow, there is serious business getting done among gaming companies, brand marketers, gaming studios and many others. We’ve come a long way from The Oregon Trail, Colecovision (who remembers that one?,) 8-, 16-, 32- and 64-bit games.

Opportunities for brands within games are still plentiful, and a good option, for some large brands, especially ones that gamers expect to see in virtual stadiums or large venues within games. Marketers and their agencies should be exploring ways for brands to engage in games with branded features or by enabling special options or views. Many sports titles have built in these sort of opportunities for years. With connected game play, in-game sponsors should be pushing game developers to enable sponsorships to go beyond the game. For example, network game play is huge, and the ability to send a message to a friend missed out of a multiplayer session in a co-branded manner would be excellent, especially within action and sports titles where “smack talk” is a crucial part of game play. 

As I have mentioned in previous posts, understanding how software and product development work are important to navigating deal making. Walking in and buying what is on the sponsorship menu is good. However, marketers and their agencies need to engage with the studios beyond standard offerings and help uncover and define better ways to create meaningful ways to engage in games. Having talked with a few folks attending E3 this year, I’m looking forward to seeing some great sponsorship announcements. 

Nintendo unveiled Near-Field Communications-enabled figurines this week. These devices, called Aiimbo, have embedded sensors and provide unique and extended play when they are near Nintendo’s Wii U platform. Sensor technology is something we should expect to see a lot more of in the coming years, so now is a great time for brands to get in and experiment. Figurines offer a great way to build a connection with a brand and can offer a bit of scarcity — think limited-edition, real-life toys that add special features to on-screen gameplay. Brands that can understand the data relationship through sensors and the ability to publish software updates can create an annuity of engagement and deliver unique experiences while also being able to digest data feedback from games. Last year, at a CMO event, I heard Marc Andreessen talk in depth about sensors, and we are only in the early days. 

Last, casual gaming has long been a lay-up for marketers to find areas of opportunity, because of the high number of easy-to-reach audience segments such as women 18-35 with significant purchasing power. Don’t worry, casual gaming is still going strong and somehow people are still playing bejeweled or any number of seemingly mindless games. That said, the news coming out of E3 seemed to show a shift back to core gamers (think console). EA announced Sims4 and promises to make the Sims even smarter. Microsoft Xbox One, while not being given a hardware update, is seeing more of its core game titles, such as Call of Duty, improve and run on the platform. Look to these pillars of the industry for cues to where the overall industry is heading, since the massive processing power in the consoles eventually makes it way to handheld devices, including your smartphones.

And now back to a rousing game of Dots and trying to beat my last high score.