Bing Gordon’s perspective on the game industry and game marketing comes from his 26 years at Electronic Arts, and then subsequent time at pre-eminent venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where Gordon is a general partner. Gordon has headed up investments in numerous firms, and serves on the board of companies like Amazon, Zynga, and N3twork. He spoke with Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat about a number of topics recently, and his comments on game marketing were insightful.
Gordon noted that he’ll be speaking at the Game Marketing Summit later this month, where he’s been asked to talk about “hacking monetization.” Gordon notes that it’s really a tackeoff on a popular Silicon Valley term “growth hacking,” but he sees the changes in monetization as equally important. “For monetization, I use the word “hacking” just because other people use it. It’s a new economy of games. I started talking about it in 2004,” Gordon said.
What’s new with marketing in 2015 that’s changed from 2012? “Instagram. It’s basically channels. 2010, Facebook was the channel. 2012, I’m not sure there was a channel,” said Gordon. “We were transitioning from web to mobile. In 2015 Instagram is a channel. Email is always a channel. How do you build awareness in the first place, and then how do you connect people socially without the Facebook notification channel ”
He sees games that connect people regularly as still an uncommon thing, though games like Game of War and Words With Friends accomplish it, and Clash of Clans does it somewhat. “It’s hard to find other people in a mobile game,” Gordon noted. The clan structure is an interesting retention mechanism for mobile games, which Gordon likened to a “light version of MMO guilds, which are an online version of fraternities and sororities.”
When it comes to game marketing, Gordon said that while games in the 90’s were showing well on TV and thus TV ads were common, now games are being designed for mobile social sharing, and nobody’s quite figured that out yet. He’s not convinced that Twitch or YouTube are the only answer. “Those do not work for all games. Those work for games that are already hits,” he said.
The tricks that worked for console game marketing in the last decade are not working so well in the new era of mobile game marketing. “What they have in common is, they all think the console game marketers are going to lose their jobs,” Gordon said. “In the 2000s, console games were marketed a lot like movies — paid television, a little bit of PR, a lot of retail marketing, and street marketing, trying to get word of mouth among opinion leaders. None of that has worked well for mobile games.”
Gordon went on to note that TV ads are still mostly focused on showing great graphics, and that mobile games just don’t generally have graphics that look great on TV. That’s why we see Liam Neeson or Kate Upton instead of images taken from the mobile game. One of the key things about mobile games is the social connectivity, and Gordon has yet to see any TV ads created around that. Of course, as Gordon notes, “It’s hard to get inventive about social endorsements, showing on video what social is.”
There’s still plenty of potential for marketing creativity when it comes to games, especially mobile games. “I do think there’s stuff going on in short-form online video that’s pretty interesting,” Gordon pointed out. “There’s stuff going on with YouTube and the various creators there. How they build an audience is interesting. But there doesn’t seem to be very many people who are thinking across games and new video simultaneously.
Gordon went on to talk about many other things, including the investment environment, wearables, and new platforms. Read the complete interview on VentureBeat here.
