This Week’s [a]list Jobs – October 9

BY

The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them. – Robert Frost

Here are this week’s [a]list jobs:

[a]list daily is your source for the hottest job openings for senior management and marketing in games, entertainment and social media.

To see last week’s jobs, click here.

The eSports Explosion

BY

By Joost van Dreunen, Superdata

In the last few years, eSports have emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments of the digital games markets. Worldwide viewership has exploded from 8.4 million in 2010 to a projected 50 million this year, and tournament prize money has increased 2,200 percent since 1999.

Recently the U.S. government began granting visas to professional gamers, underlying the potential for this growing market. But the real opportunity in eSports is its tremendous audience engagement and unique user demographic of 18 to 34 year old males. We believe this is the best touchpoint for advertisers and marketers to reach the coveted gamer audience today.

Where social and mobile games have made interactive entertainment a mainstay for the casual audience, eSports provide a unique platform for hardcore gamers to play and compete together.

 

‘Pause Less’ With Plantronics’ Gaming Headset

BY

Plantronics is launching the RIG Headset + Mixer, what it’s calling the first product in a new line developed specifically with gamers in mind. What sets the headset apart is a mixer that gives users fine control over one of two incoming and outgoing audio channels, for instance one with game audio and another for phone calls or music  To highlight the feature, Plantronics worked with Ayzenberg on an interactive site that demonstrates exactly how gamers can put the feature to practical use.

The RIG site is a nifty interactive product demo, and it manages to get its features across with some dramedy.  It’s about men who game, and the women who love them.  Gamers know all too well that the women in their lives have a knack for calling right when their session is in full swing.  With RIG, all it takes is a mood for multitasking to take that incoming call from your girlfriend or your mother.  Flick a button on the mixer and audio switches from game audio to an incoming call.  In the demo, the first call is your girlfriend and she wants to make dinner plans.  She wants Vegan.  You want BBQ.  She acquiesces because she’s awesome, and this is advertising.  The best part, you never stopped gaming, dodging bullets on your virtual battlefield while dodging bombs like Vegan food off of it.  Then your mother calls to say it’s her birthday this week.  I might have stopped gaming here, but the demo shows with RIG, you don’t have to.

One of the RIG mixer’s best features is that it not only lets users switch between audio sources but actually listen to both and control their volume individually.  This is great for listening to music but not having to sacrifice game audio or in-game chatting with your multiplayer pals. I guess that’s true even if they’re rattling on about their broken love life, like in the demo. If you have to listen to your buddy’s sob story, why not cue in some sweet acoustic guitar to go with it.

The RIG works with just about any device you might want to game, talk or listen to things on — PC, consoles, smartphones and tablets.  It retails for $129, and it should be on shelves at major retailers starting today.

“No other product in the gaming headset marketplace has been developed specifically for gaming while using a tablet or smartphone, and we’re thrilled that gamers around the world can start connecting their game life and real life, starting today,” states Plantronics gaming products director Chuck Frizelle in the RIG’s launch press release.

Look for an upcoming exclusive interview with Frizelle and Dorothy Ferguson, Plantronics director of product marketing, looking at the launch of the RIG and how it represents Plantronics’ renewed focus on gaming products.

Rebel To ‘Storm The Gates’ Via Kickstarter

BY

Rebel Entertainment is an online game studio in Burbank, California, comprised of veterans from Disney, Zynga, Atari, Insomniac, Electronic Arts and other companies. Rebel is a division of IAC, the media giant (2012 revenue: $2.8 billion) that owns sites ranging from Ask.com to CollegeHumor.com to Vimeo to The Daily Beast. Rebel’s first game, Dungeon Rampage, is an online action-RPG available of Facebook, Kongregate, and at DugeonRampage.com. Rebel’s newest project is Storm the Gates, and the company is turning to Kickstarter in order to launch the game.

Why should a division of a major company turn to crowdfunding to bring a game to market The [a]list daily spoke with Rebel CEO Mike Goslin to find out the answer.

“Storm the Gates is cross-platform and multiplayer,”said Goslin. “It’s a very ambitious game in terms of bringing new kinds of gameplay to tablet and cross-platform. It’s also targeting more of a core audience, although it’s pretty accessible, with a lot of depth and a lot of competitive play.” Goslin notes that the game is turn-based, but you don’t have to wait around for people to make their moves. “We’re really trying to accommodate people’s schedules,” Goslin noted. He added, “We do have a head-to-head strictly turn-based mode” which will appeal to people who want a more immediate sense of combat. The game is set in what Goslin calls a “rich fantasy world” with orcs and humans battling for control, and new races planned for expansions.

The game sounds like it’s got key features that players are looking for: mobile platforms, cross-platform, easy to pick up but with a lot of depth. So why does Rebel need to turn to Kickstarter to get the game on the market?

“A little bit of it is opportunistic,” said Goslin. “We were founded by IAC as our single large investor, and we did Dungeon Rampage under that circumstance. We started development on this game and got pretty far along, it was pretty close to being launched, when IAC decided it wanted to scaled down their investment in games, including us. We were left with a game that was mostly done, and although we could have gone out and done traditional funding for it, we thought that it was almost done and we’d like to find out how well the game does before we go out and raise more traditional kind of VC or other investment money.”

Goslin continued, “We thought we’d try Kickstarter because they give us more flexibility on what we’d do with the game. We’re also intrigued by by the idea of crowdfunding rather than going with a tradition publisher or investor. It’s not proven yet whether you can do a game like this for the platforms we’re doing it for, so it’s relatively high risk but also high reward. So we though we would benefit from having more control if we could essentially fund it through Kickstarter and our own means.”

The game is targeted for Android and iOS tablets, then will arrive on PC and ultimately for Facebook as well. “It is playable on a smartphone, but it’s a better experience on a tablet,” said Goslin. “It’s nice to be able to access it from your phone too, because you might want to just send a message to your teammates or make a few moves. One of the things that sets this game apart from other strategy games is you can play team multiplayer, up to five versus five (against other players or against AI). This creates some amazing, epic confrontations when you’ve got teams going up against each other on a big board.”

Storm the Gates is designed as a free-to-play game, where you can use money to buy more moves — but only up to a point. “We wanted to balance it so it’s not a pay to win experience,” said Goslin. “You can only use a certain number of special items, and thatt won’t guarantee victory.” Most of the monetization is around collecting units, or ones that allow you to team up in a complementary way, Goslin explained.

The game is already far along in development, with testing having been ongoing for a year. “We’re prepared to launch within weeks after the Kickstarter closes,” said Goslin. “We’ll do the Kickstarter for 30 days and we probably need two to three weeks after that before we can launch. We’re thinking definitely fall.”

One of the things designers like Chris Roberts say they have gotten from crowdfunding is feedback on the design. “The core audience for this game is heavily represented in the Kickstarter community, so it’s a great vehicle for us to both gauge interest from that core audience and get feedback on what they want to see in the game,” said Goslin. “We have a lot of content that’s in advanced stages of production, but we can choose to focus on some or others based on feedback we’re getting during the Kickstarter.”

So far, the Storm the Gates Kickstarter is moving slowly. It’s still under $5,000 pledged towards a goal of $400,000 after nearly a week, which does not exhibit the kind of early enthusiasm needed to propel successful Kickstarters. It’s a tough audience there, with many games vying for attention and pledges. Rebel may need to seek alternative ways to bring its new game to market and build the audience for it. It seems these days a good Kickstarter campaign needs a good pre-campaign effort in order to hit the ground running, adding to the time, complexity, and difficulty of successful Kickstarters. There are no easy paths to getting a game to market.

Microsoft’s Game Changer For Marketers

BY

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Vice President of Marketing and Strategy outlined how the Xbox One could literally be a game changer for advertisers come November 22, when the platform launches in many markets around the world. At the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing Conference, Mehdi said he thinks the platform has potential to up the ante for marketers by furthering the “gamification” of advertising, and spur people to look for high production values just like the Xbox One will offer.

“We are trying to bridge some of the world between online and offline. That’s a little bit of a holy grail in terms of how you understand the consumer in that 360 degrees of their life. We have a pretty unique position at Microsoft because of what we do with digital, as well as more and more with television because of Xbox. It’s early days, but we’re starting to put that together in more of a unifying way, and hopefully at some point we can start to offer that to advertisers broadly,” said Mehdi.

After the speech, marketers in the audience had some misconceptions about what information the Xbox One could possibly provide advertisers, mainly with the Xbox One’s Kinect functionality. An advanced motion sensor, the Kinect could ostensibly be used to track the biometric responses of users and to determine whether or not they are paying attention to the ads. The new Kinect will be able to recognize up to 6 voices in a room, detect skeletal movement, respond to voice commands and track heart rates.

Microsoft’s Larry Hryb was quick to clear up this speculation over Twitter {link no longer active} in saying that Microsoft will not collect information to share or sell.

“You are fully in control of your personal data. Your privacy is important to us,” Hryb posted.

If the Kinect could ever be used to collect data on users who are compliant, the device would be a huge boon for marketers who would no doubt want access. The Xbox One could also spur users to ask more of their advertising as an experience that could bring mobile, TV and gaming together.

Source: AdAge  {link no longer active}

Twitter Global Growth Outpaces U.S.

BY

Twitter’s growth, both domestically and internationally has come as no surprise to users of the popular social network. What is surprising however, is how much more popular the social network is abroad. In the span of three short years, Twitter’s U.S. accounts have increased by 39 million users, but increased by a staggering 149 million users in the rest of the world.

Twitter popularity appears to have happened in tangent with the proliferation of mobile devices. Cell phones and Twitter have always gone hand in hand. A study was recently released that says there are almost as many mobile subscriptions as there are people on the planet.

Source: Mashable

 

Must Be The Sugar High

BY

One of the best ways to attract attention to your brand is doing something weirdly unforgettable in your commercials. There’s something of a precedent for odd candy commercials (see what Skittles has done), and Trolli builds on that tradition.