When We Made

The face of gaming is changing – marketers need to catch up

Gaming audiences are evolving, so it’s more important than ever that marketers know who they’re speaking to, and what their message is.

There are countless clichés about the video game industry, and one of the most prevalent is the idea that there is such a thing as a typical gamer. If you ask someone to describe a ‘gamer’ they’ll most likely paint a stereotypical picture of a young male with a controller in his hands.

The true picture of a gamer is infinitely more diverse, as anyone who has had the pleasure of attending Gamescom in real life can attest. However, this isn’t necessarily reflected in the way games are marketed. This suggests some in the industry believe these clichés themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Women in Gaming

Research by Newzoo shows that, contrary to popular perceptions (both inside and outside of the industry), 42% of console gamers are female. But when looking at the product, creative and targeting of many major console game marketing campaigns, it would be easy to think that only men are buying games.

In terms of product, it sometimes feels like one step forward and one step back. Analysis of the games showcased in press-conferences at E3 between 2015 and 2019 showed a disconnect in representation. The number of games with multiple character options had increased and the games which ‘centred’ males as the primary characters had gone down. However, the number of games showcased in 2019 which centred women was also lower than all bar one of the previous four years. One of the many sad things about E3 not taking place this year is that we will never know if that number would have gone up.

Ciarán Norris has over 20 years’ experience of digital marketing. His experience leading award-winning teams encompasses embedding SEO best practice into major media organisations, leading the commercial roll-out of Tumblr in Australia, and working with clients ranging from Nike to Rolex, Unilever to Ford.

Ciarán currently leads Facebook’s team focused on supporting PC & Console Gaming companies in EMEA.

There are, however, positive signs. Games such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood and The Last of Us Part II showed us the cliche that gamers won’t play games built around female characters is a myth. More recently, Square Enix didn’t put Captain America, Iron Man or one of the obvious male characters at the heart of Marvel’s Avengers, but instead built the game around Ms Marvel, a Muslim Pakistanki-American woman, and the game was the best selling title in the UK at the time of writing this.

One of the most anticipated games of the year, Cyberpunk 2077, will do away with binary gender choices entirely. As CD Projekt Red’s Senior Concept Artist Marthe Jonkers said: “You don’t choose your gender... you now choose a body type...and we have two voices, one that’s male sounding, one is female sounding. You can mix and match.”

These games are simply tapping into pent up demand within the gaming community, as our analysis of conversations around the last two E3s showed. At E3 2018, women represented 39 per cent of the conversations taking place on Facebook on the first morning of the event but in the run up to E3 2019, they made up 41 per cent of the conversation.

The ads that are being shown to these existing and potential customers also often reinforce the stereotype of games designed primarily for men, but evidence from similar industries shows that needn’t be the

“It’s clear that many in the industry care passionately about building an environment that’s more welcoming to women, and about making games that better represent them”

case. When looking to acquire new audiences, the entertainment industry often relies on a convergent personalization strategy. This can often lead to unconscious bias in the advertising (for example, action is for men, romance for women).

When working with the BBC on the launch of the first female Dr Who, we wanted to establish deeper, unbiased connections with the intended new audiences at each opportunity. We did this by leveraging machine learning and real people feedback in the development of new trailers, to minimize assumptions, increase relevance and, ultimately, drive business results; for that particular campaign, a 36 point lift in ad recall amongst females.

Make 2021 the year of diversity

It’s clear that many in the industry care passionately about building an environment that’s more welcoming to women, and about making games that better represent them. We’re very proud to be one of the five founding Pledge Partners for UKIE’s #RaiseTheGame Diversity Pledge but even happier there are now more than 60 other companies associated with the gaming that have signed up. If yours isn’t one of them, now is the time to do so.

2021 promises to be an incredible year for the games industry. It will start with two new consoles and continuing potential for VR and cloud gaming, all of which could broaden PC and console gaming audiences even further beyond the outdated cliches of young men.

It’s also an opportunity to refresh marketing strategies and media plans to fully embrace the diversity of gamers. Because if they aren’t in line with the people the games industry doesn’t currently reach, they risk missing the chance to bring a new generation of players into the next generation of gaming.

When We Made...

Fall Guys

actually look at you. And even with that little bit of work, with the help of the animation and really smart designers and engineers, with everybody working together, you could tell from the very beginning that she was a character that people would really gravitate Chris Wallace takes a look behind the toward.” scenes of the surprise mega-success of Quill really becomes a fully fleshed out character with the year, and finds out what it means for the help of the game’s strong world-building. As an Mediatonic going forward. interloper in Quill’s world, the player experiences it not through her eyes, but as an observer watching as she lives her life in her familiar setting. It’s a strangely intimate feeling, and one which gives way to joint apprehension as both the player and Quill enter new, unfamiliar areas. “When you go through Mousetown and you see Quill run through there and you see that she has a hometown, Ithink it’s fair to say that Fall Guys has done pretty well for Mediatonic. It’s strange to think, last I spoke to the studio, around the launch of the Tonic Games the feeling of her leaving it, of that town maybe being in Group, that their then-upcoming title was mentioned danger, gives you more of a bond,” Alderson says. “If just in passing. that part was left out, you wouldn’t feel like there was The team was clearly excited about Fall Guys, but much to fight for. Everything that we’ve done, the mood we had no idea that the game would soon come to settings, taking Quill from one area to the next and letting dominate my Twitter feed for months to come – a you rest and take in this environment… It’s all supposed dramatic improvement over the filth you people to exaggerate and accentuate that mood that you’re usually fill it with, frankly. feeling. It all ties back into how you are connecting with Looking back it’s hard not to kick myself for not Above: Jeff Tanton, Mediatonic Quill and her world.”having a sense of what the game would become – think of how much of a smug ‘I told you so’ article this SAME QUESTION EIGHT WAYS could have been! The game’s already iconic art style Collaboration was key during the development of Moss, and character design, mixed with its anarchic pick-upnot just within the team itself, but with the help of external and-play gameplay, makes it look destined for success playtesters. People were often brought in to feedback on – in hindsight, at least. In fact, it’s this perceived simplicity, its ability to appeal to inexperienced players with little explanation, that has led some to imply that this was an easy win for Mediatonic – a simple game, released at the right time to tap into the right market. “It’s interesting when people are like ‘oh, Mediatonic has had this huge hit and they’re making it look easy,’” notes Jeff Tanton, creative director at Mediatonic. “This was not easy. You know, we actually went through

the game and asked questions about their experience – even if most of these questions were actually very similar.

“External playtests were mostly about ‘Okay, how do people feel when they play? Do they like it or not like it?’,” Alderson explains. “At the end of playtest we would ask the same question eight different ways. The question is really ‘What didn’t you like?’, but we would ask it differently: ‘What pulled you out of the experience? What took you out of the headset? If there’s one thing you could change what would it be? If you had two weeks to finish the game, what would be the thing that you’d fix?’

“Those help bring a playtester into their comfort zone, because no one wants to play something that people put a time in the studio where we had a few projects fall a lot of care and love into and then turn around and say through and didn’t work out the way we expected, ‘This is what I didn’t like about it’. So it takes a little while and we’d take on other projects – because we’re to get the playtester comfortable, and we found that a resilient studio. One of our designers used to say finding different ways to ask the same question means that we’re ever prepared for misfortune, we’ve got a you eventually get the really good stuff after the fourth or survivor’s instinct around that.” fifth time you ask it. “I don’t think anyone in our studio has ever made a FOOL’S GAUNTLET game like this, so I think it’s important that you trust the It’s this survivor’s instinct, and being able to move on process. You trust playtesting and you make sure that you from misfortune that led to Fall Guys’ creation. As allow yourself some time and freedom to try something Tanton explains, in the months before GDC 2018, the and then keep going. Try something new and branch out, team looked back at some of their previous projects but also use your experience from games that you’ve – ones where they had studied the industry, believing made before and you’ll be fine. As long as you’re having they’d found a niche, but the projects hadn’t quite fun too! We enjoyed playing Moss throughout the entire worked out. process and I think that really helps.” “So I asked the team specifically, ‘just this once, throw business out the window and pitch me something you want to play.’ And out of that, Joe Walsh [game designer at Mediatonic] came to me with this one pager, which he called Fool’s Gauntlet.

“And it was great, because it was clearly something he wanted to play, and inadvertently he had found something that had an incredible business case behind it as well. The only thing working against it was that it was a Battle Royale, and I was like, ‘Fortnite and PUBG are everywhere. There’s literally no way we’re

going to find we’re going to be able to sell ourselves in the battle royale space.’”

Still, Fall Guys found a way to stand out against the crowd, and Mediatonic took the game to publisher Devolver Digital.

“I think we had a strong feeling we’re going to take this to Devolver” says Tanton, “we’ve always wanted to work with them again, we were just glad that they liked it. I think we could have taken elsewhere quite easily, but when Devolver got on board we just knew it was just a match for us.

“The game didn’t land fully formed, but Joe’s pitch was strong. Generally we have a series of rounds of meetings – I think Pixar calls them ‘brain trusts,’ which is a very wanky term – but it’s basically we’d get people in the room to give honest feedback and knock the idea into shape, and that happened very, very quickly for Fall Guys.”

If only the rest of the process was as painless. While Fall Guys may be simple to play, it certainly wasn’t a simple process putting it together.

“The thing with Fall Guys is, this is fully networked physics, with 60 players all at once, where everyone is having broadly exactly the same experiences as everyone else at the same time. There’s all of these messages about where your limbs are, how you’re Left: Fall Guys was born out of a pitch originally called Fool’s Gauntlet

falling, how the physics is taking effect... that was a huge overhead for the team and just a constant thing they had to tackle.

“That was the bravery of the team. The only way to do that work is to have to get it working with five players, then ten and then you optimise and you build up. They basically entered this thing not knowing if it was possible, but just kind of hoping they could make it work. So, huge respect for the engineering team for pushing through that and having all of these physics characters knocking about and doing all the right things. That was tough.”

Beyond just getting the game to function at all, the team had the additional challenge of not being able to play it for much of development.

“We always thought the game would be fun, but we struggled with the early levels, because it’s really tough to test at scale – we had to find 60 people.