Marketology blog by Radoslav Minchev

Games

July 10th, 2009 | Trackback

Do you remember those pocket devices which companies like Casio released on the market right after the first calculators appeared? Somehow unnoticeably, a brand new market came into being between the personal computers and some of the pioneers in the console games. Brands and games started mushrooming and moved the nucleus of contemporary entertainment business with the speed of light. If someone has played quest, which can loosen your imagination to the utmost, he can easily answer the question why some games turned into bases of a brand new culture not only on the game market, but rather in the way we communicate and share our emotions.

Emotions and established habits lie in the basis of a great part of everyday decisions and choices we all make consciously or subconsciously. About five years ago the number of internet users in Bulgaria was about one million people and many advertisers thought that internet is a weak and risky communication channel, even though there was already a tendency for participation in promotions through “new” mechanisms and communication channels. When your task is to sale one million promo products for seven weeks to an audience between 20 and 30 years of age from both sexes, you weigh the “risk” of “insecure” internet media and decide whether to play or not. It was a risky move back then, because no one on the local market had paved the way in this media as a main channel for participation in promotions. It is natural to have a back-up plan for parallel participation, though in the end 88% of the activity was generated through internet and only 12% through SMS messages. Practically, today there is hardly any BTL activity which relies on cutting, collecting and sending etiquettes or package logos. Participation through unique codes of promo products have become a steady tendency through which one can easily sale substantial quantities of goods and services as long as there is a good knowledge of the concrete market, media, audience, etc. By symbolic investments in television, the focus was easily moved to internet. After seven weeks of different games for girls and boys, the web page visits reached eight hundred thousand. Today, internet users in our country exceed three million people, yet a main part of advertisers, advertising agencies and media shops only cover My Space, Facebook and Second Life. I don’t even want to mention the number of world players well aware of the electronic sports, cyber culture and contemporary trends in the interactive PR… but with pleasure and respect I can say that for me electronic games have been something much more than fun for many years now.

Perhaps it was my love for electronic games or my vision of contemporary communication which made me plunge into the RIA technologies and online business. Perhaps the fact that a great number of my friends and business partners spend a lot of time behind the keyboard made me seriously consider not only what is happening to the global communication, but also what lies before humankind in a mental, emotional and purely human aspect. Perhaps right at this moment the game ends for someone and starts for someone else.