Top Gaming Trends (September 2023)

Consumers report that photo anxiety increasingly interferes with many memorable events since people are constantly wondering if they should be taking a picture rather than enjoying the experience. But as cameras and wearables get more common, it will be more and more practical to just record everything and then go back and select the best moments after the fact.

Part of the issue is that it's hard to snap a photo at the perfect second. A recent change in how iPhones take pictures solves some of this: the photo is actually a 3-second video (with the 3-second window starting just before the button press), so it's possible to go back frame-by-frame and capture the perfect moment. This idea is now extending to online games, where a new service, Gif Your Game, lets players convert perfectly-timed gameplay videos into easily shareable GIFs that they can then post on Discord, Reddit, and Twitter.

Sharable snippets have been an increasingly important driver of cultural awareness in the last few years; an apt reaction GIFs play the same kind of linguistic role today that a well-chosen Bible verse might have played in the 19th century. And media companies know that GIFs are a powerful marketing tool, a low-cost means of raising awareness, and of promoting peer endorsement.

For games, traditional GIF generation was challenging, because recording the screen could introduce performance issues during gameplay. Gif Your Game uses a different approach: it's really recording the changes in game state, not the video itself, which means that there isn't a performance hit and also that the replay can be viewed from different angles. The product can be configured to automatically record specific in-game events, so someone playing a first-person shooter can know that there will be a video of every kill, or a sports gamer will know that they can review every goal.

This doesn’t just improve performance for computer hardware, but for the gamer, too; they want to be thinking about playing the game, not about whether they should be recording. It’s a tool for gamers to never lose their best moments.

This is especially interesting because anxiety about when to enjoy the moment and when to start recording is common in the real world, too; ironically, the digital world is coming up with solutions for living in the moment faster than the analog world can. While recording everything then going back for what you want is currently restricted to gaming, cheaper cameras, storage, and connectivity mean that it will spread to other parts of life, too.

Many online media sites put substantial effort into optimizing their sharing process. For example, when a TikTok video is being viewed in a browser, ⌘-L, the hotkey for selecting the URL, gets hijacked to show a sharing dialogue instead, with prompts to post the link to various social media sites. Sharing is especially important in gaming since so many games are multiplayer; sharing a gameplay GIF is practically inviting someone to buy the game and try it out themselves.

Many image- or GIF-creating sites add a watermark to raise brand awareness, but Gif Your Game does not. Instead, the service operates on the assumption that there's wide awareness of its brand in the gamer community, and that if anyone asks how the video was recorded, someone else will chime in and say it was through Gif Your Game. This is much more organic than merely including the watermark; it’s a peer endorsement, rather than an ad.

Fitness surprisingly wasn’t always popular. The Olympics inspired a running surge in the 1970s. In the 1980s, stationary bikes first started making their way into gyms everywhere. And the release of Jane Fonda’s Workout exercise videos in 1982 is largely credited with kickstarting aerobics’ popularity. In the grand scheme of things, the commercialization of fitness is a relatively recent phenomena.

As the fitness industry boomed, everything from supplements to courses took off and turned into a massive industry. The sports nutrition market in North America alone clocked in at a whopping $12.6B in 2020.

Today, gaming is a massive and growing market - some estimates size the gaming market as even bigger than the movie business and North American sports put together. Another way to look at it: Top-grossing games earn $10B+ while top-grossing movies earn low billions. Many argue too that the gaming industry is still early in its days of commercialization and, as the space gets more commercialized, gamers are increasingly looking for real life powerups.

This has created a growing category of products and brands – everything from finger sleeves which are like sweatbands for gamers’ fingers to emerging brands like GamerSupps, Gamerbulk, and G Fuel which sell what is essentially caffeine for gamers. Sometimes the biggest categories start out as a new take on an old product.

And while the gaming market is bigger – financially speaking – than most people realize, it’s also broader demographically. Women make up 46% of U.S. gamers and almost 40% of gamers are older than 35.

If there's a large skill gap between trained and untrained players, it can be demotivating to get an accurate assessment of one's play. So Leetify, which tracks players' actions automatically and summarizes them after games, uses a different kind of metric: it calculates players' relative abilities, showing where they're stronger or weaker. In other words, Leetify tells players that someone who is as good as they are at aiming should be much better at dodging. This is a way to simultaneously provide both guidance and encouragement and, in some cases, is an alternative to a leaderboard. If you’re 99th percentile at one thing, Leetify implies, there’s no reason you can’t work up to being 99th percentile at everything. Since people develop unevenly, Leetify is always giving users something new to work on.

The rise of competitive gaming, more broadly, has created a two-tiered gaming culture. Some players just want to relax and have a good time, while others want to excel competitively. As games get more challenging, and players refine their techniques, it gets harder and harder to leave the first group and join the second.

Even for casual players, the required skill level is rising. Gen Y treats video games the way an older generation treated golf: as a way to socialize while also competing. This has led to a profusion of companies that offer training and analytics to help players build up their skills. Leetify is popular in this space, focusing on improving players' skills in a specific version of Counterstrike. Counterstrike is one game of many, and far less popular than games like Fortnite, indicating that this is a large market with room for more participants.

Voicemod, a voice changing tool for gamers, uses a creative pricing strategy and a similarly brilliant defensive SEO strategy.

For years, video games have let players customize their character’s looks. But if they chat with other players during the game using services like Steam (over 100M monthly active users), they still have their real-world voice. For a number of reasons, gamers are increasingly using products like VoiceMod to customize their voice the same way for in-game chat.

Many freemium products get caught in a classic pricing paradox where total value is zero sum so the more value you give up front to free users, the less there is to give to paid users. But Voicemod creatively gets around this.

They offer a free version of the product, which includes a set of voice modifications—but they rotate which ones are available every week. It’s free to try out identities, but costs money to keep the one you like. It’s a form of price-discrimination; VoiceMod doesn’t bother selling to people who want to use a funny voice for a prank call, but does want subscription revenue from anyone who wants to choose their online identity.

Voicemod also has a clever SEO strategy. Because they're targeting gamers, who are tech savvy, have lots of free time, but may not have much disposable income or even a credit card, they also engage in defensive SEO: their site has blog posts designed to rank for terms like “voicemod crack” and “voicemod license key download” so they can capture users who are looking for a free copy and encourage them to pay up instead.

This has been moderately successful: Voicemod is the first non-video result on Google for “voicemod crack”.

This dynamic of renting an identity holds true in realms outside of gaming: if your identity revolves around being fashionable, fit, or up-to-date on pop culture, it requires a constant investment of time and money. Cosmetics might be the most extreme example: you can use samples to look a certain way, but you have to make continuous purchases to keep your chosen appearance