A Responsible Brand Starts from Within

Article | May 17, 2021

Ubisoft announced last week that it is adding specific focus on free-to-play, alongside its AAA catalogue. In doing so, it is following a route that has been very successful for Activision with its Warzone strategy. Free-to-play games which draw audiences via big franchise names and monetise via in-game spending are going to be increasingly common among AAA publishers. The focus on in-game spending and particularly on the cosmetic, rather than the progress-related, parts will be the key revenue component. As games become less finite and more perpetual (consumer goal is less about ‘finishing them’ and more and ‘playing/spending time in them’), the opportunity to monetise needs that stem from this perpetual engagement (e.g. socialising or expression) starts to outweigh the mere monetisation of access to a packaged product. Simultaneously, free-to-play games also act as a powerful marketing driver for AAA releases as they come out, as well as streamability and word of mouth for the franchise.

Article | March 18, 2020

It's been nearly four years since HTC and Facebook's Oculus launched this generation of virtual reality (VR) with the Vive and Rift headsets, respectively. They were supposed to be revolutionary products that would open up a new world of innovation that would disrupt nearly every aspect of our lives. Instead of being in every home, as hoped, VR is still a novelty with only a few million headsets in the market. HTC and Oculus are actually trailing Sony's (NYSE:SNE) PSVR, which recently surpassed 5 million headsets sold since launch. And the number of headsets being used on a regular basis is well short of that number. So why hasn't VR taken off, and can HTC and Oculus fix what's ailing the industry?

Article | February 25, 2020

Whether you realise it or not, we are entering a new and unprecedented age: one driven largely by artificial intelligence. Up until very recently, artificial intelligence was of a very narrow sort. Put simply, it could do certain things, like arithmetic, very well. But other things, like speech recognition and complex decision-making, were left to humans. Nowadays, computing power has reached a stage where machines can learn for themselves – and the implications are sure to be felt in every area of the economy. This includes the entertainment industry – right down to smaller studios, who, with the help of small business loans, are now able to access worlds of ai-driven power previously denied to them.

Article | February 19, 2020

Sometimes the statistics around how many people are streaming music – and how many are paying for it – can lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Recently, for example, we’ve seen one story suggesting that Amazon was “on course to overtake Apple Music” based on comparing an Amazon figure from January 2020 with one from Apple that hadn’t been updated since June 2019. Another story claimed that “Pandora has overtaken Apple for second spot” in subscriber rankings, which mistakenly compared the former’s number of active listeners (most of whom don’t pay) to the latter’s paid subscriber count.