Gaming – The Next Business Platform

Gaming is becoming a hot topic at the corporate level in my job as a Business Strategy Advisor on the Microsoft Innovation Team in conversations with major corporations.   Gaming is ever increasing in terms of a primary entertainment activity, as well as, capturing the eye of corporate america.   As a industry unto itself, it is estimated to be a ~$70 Billion dollar vertical in 2012.   Launches of recent titles, such as, Halo from Microsoft are highlight anticipated events.   Opening day sales can net hundreds of millions of dollars of new revenue rivaling and recently exceeding the entertainment industry.   To put that into perspective, new video game launches, are bigger than any movie, any book, or other event in the history of entertainment!   Even more interesting is the trends of adoption across not only youth, but adult demographics.    Gaming is becoming a preferred activity for entertainment and a differentiated experience that one gets to participate in vs. only  sit and view/read the medium.    That participation can also span collaborative experience with friends, clubs, or a world of fellow enthusiasts making it a shared experience and one of shared memories that builds affinity for repeating those types of activities.

Gaming has been enjoying large scale participation for several decades.  If we look participation today and the amount of time being invested into playing video games we see numbers in excess of 350 million daily players averaging over 3 billion hours a week.   To put that in perspective, there has already been more parallel hours of video games played than sequential hours of the entire evolution of the human species.

The technology behind gaming is constantly changing as well.   Improved user experiences and large scaling back ends have been at the forefront of the technology conversation over many years.  Natural interfaces have enjoyed a more recent surge of interest from technology vendors.   This includes the integration of voice recognition, facial gesture recognition, full body gesture recognition, tactile touch and a variety of sensors for monitoring human activities.   Each advancement opens the door further to more intuitive interaction and lowers the barrier for adoption.    Underneath all this “usability” lies the analytics to track and profile how people are using the technology.

With the amount of user participating, the amount of time spent participating, the lowering of natural interface barriers and the underlying analytics it is no wonder that corporate america is showing increased interest in reaching this audience.   To better understand how this interest might manifest interest by corporations lets break down the possible applications by different goals.