Microsoft made a slew of announcements at the E3 gaming conference yesterday, most notably in our view is the integration with social networking sites with the Xbox 360 gaming experience. From this Fall, Xbox Gold gamers (paid for network service) will be able to access Twitter and Facebook from the game console. For example, some games will be capable of uploading screen shots to Facebook (using Facebook Connect), and Twitter statuses can be updated from games too. Xbox Live can also access Facebook and Twitter services.
We dedicated a report on this subject, which we released to clients on December 2, 2008, on how gaming will be part of an online social profile. We argued in particular that game console vendors should integrate their games and platforms with third party social networking sites. As the report amongst other points out:
-social networking sites get more user information and can sell higher yielding advertising to the gaming industry. They can also drive new memberships, and longer stays and more page views per user session.
-game developers and publishers increase market exposure (gaming profiles on Facebook-type services with information about which games a person has, track records, trophies and, scores, team affiliations etc) and they can drive special promotions and recommendations.
-gamers can challenge other people via third party sites (not just for first person shooters but also for those that prefer boards/trivias/puzzle games like Sudoku can use social networking sites to challenge or play against their connections.
-gamers increase knowledge about which of their social network connections play games, which games they have and other gaming information their connections have decided to share with the community.
-sharing of in-game video is a gem to be captured, and hopefully game developers will see this market opportunity to drive sales. We expect some really innovative new features where gamers can capture video from their game play and upload and share it on social networking sites. Game developers should capitalise on this opportunity as it is enables gamers to create their own favourite user generated trailer for the game title. Share this with Facebook/Youtube type services and there you go, the strongest marketing there is; users telling other users what to get and why.
Going forwards, as our report points out, the next steps will be to provide features that enable users to challenge and launch the game session directly from a SN site, to enable the above mentioned video service, and to more tightly integrate user preferences and network preferences with recommendations. Over time we expect that gaming will be just yet another activity that is tightly integrated with social networking sites.
