Why the games industry has less to fear than the music & TV industries, in moving online

I was intrigued by the title of this article - skeptical of gaming following other media online.  But I think it doesn’t follow that because the TV & Music industries have done so badly that gaming will struggle to find their feet too.

The reason gaming will work in a move online is that it’s gaming developers themselves doing it, the creative is moving online.  With TV and music big intermediaries sat between the creative and the consumer.  This made them slower to respond, more brittle.  They broke.  They were too slow to respond to customer demand and ended up losing control of the consumer (in music’s case to either piracy or Apple).



Incidentally this wasn’t as great a deal for the consumer as is popularly seen.  Much as I love all things Apple, it likes to control the user experience, and has become a new gatekeeper between the creative and the audience.  This, again, introduces inefficiency.  It’s a far better deal than the previous - no downloads, screw the consumer - attitude.  But eventually that inefficiency will be exposed.  The wisdom of crowds will prevail and the more open the platforms will win.

This will in a lot of ways work better, for more artists, than today.  But that’s not to say it’ll be the same deal it is today.  The creative will be closer to the fans, more responsive able to meet their needs better.  But they’re going to have to earn their keep.  If they cannot command more from their audience than merely the attention it takes to consume their content then by definition that content is not of commercial value.  In no artform do all artists earn fantastic wages - history’s poor starving artist cliches and stereotypes emerge for a reason.

Being more efficient this new world should actually allow more artists in the long tail to find a large enough audience to make a living.  Conversely many big-label artists who are doing insanely well right now, might make a lot less in a world where restricted distribution and marketing muscle are no longer as significant revenue drivers as quality and customer satisfaction.  In the most literal of senses it’s a democratizing force.

It isn’t that megastars won’t continue to bank - look at Lady Gaga and her innovative approach to monetizing the audience, instead of the art itself.  But then she is a genius (see previous posts).  It is in recognizing this and embracing new media and new technology that the music industry starts to become more like the games industry.  Starts to remove barriers between the creative and the audience.

…and that’s the key here.  The gaming industry has less to fear from moving on line.  It will be more responsive because the audience will be in direct contact to the source of the media - the game.  Now, technology like OnLive might be the key to unlocking a lot of this now - and there’s the risk there that they become a new gatekeeper - but eventually someone will bring out a white-label, licensed version of an OnLive service for anyone to license that’s economic at scale, so that the games companies can own the customer relationship directly.