Monday, January 23, 2012

Week 2 EOC: Boston Consulting Group - Video Games


A Boston Consulting Group created a matrix to measure market growth rate and then divide them into 4 different categories; Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks or Dogs. This post is going to use the current state of the video game industry to show an example of each category and the outlook for each. The easiest to start with is Stars, so lets do that; the Star of today’s video would be the hardware console. It is home to the games and today games are the largest selling items in entertainment; “Activision, the game's publisher, said that Modern Warfare 3 sales had totalled more than $400 million (£250m) in the first 24 hours in Britain and the United States alone. The game went on sale worldwide on Tuesday.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/video-game-news/8884726/Call-of-Duty-Modern-Warfare-3-breaks-sales-records.html. The Cash Cows of the industry is the mobile apps and games designed for iOS and Android devices. The games for devices are priced low but reach insane amount of numbers, ie Angry Birds “Rovio just announced that its golden egg mobile game Angry Birds just passed 500M game downloads worldwide, making it one of the most downloaded games in history.


Angry Birds players amass 300 million minutes of playing time each day, Rovio added.” http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-02/tech/30349193_1_rovio-angry-birds-black-ops#ixzz1kKTlp7bH. The Web based games would be the question marks; since it has unknown numbers, is still in its infancy and technology is for it is improving. Companies are still trying to test out this market area “Social gaming giant and all-round gaming industry controversy center Zynga spends approximately $300 in marketing in order to gain every new paying customer. When the average paying customer only shells out $150 during their time playing Zynga games, the math doesn’t look good.” http://gnews.com/zynga-spends-300-dollars-for-every-new-paying-player-16201244015523/. The dog is without any doubt the PC gaming market, it simply has been passed by with consoles being connected to the bigger TV in the house and web based stuff inside the browser, the demand has dwindled. “Company frontman John Carmack shocked everyone when he recently provided this quote: "We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version.” http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/58964-pc-gaming-is-dead-even-id-says-so

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