Taking MMOG to New Markets

If you haven't checked out Club Penguin yet, do it. It's worth dealing with the registration feature, which is (rightly) ultra-skeptical of anyone over fourteen attempting to sign up. In case you really don't want to bother, there is a great Wikipedia article here.

In case it's not immediately obvious, Club Penguin is the hottest site for kids aged 8 to 14. It's a great case study for a company marketing a game to a demographic that hasn't touched such things before. In Club Penguin's case, the effect is multiplied by the fact that not only have these individuals never played games, but their demographic has never played these sorts of games for a variety of reasons. Yet they seem to be doing a solid job of it. I'm going to assume that they foresaw the plethora of ultra-popular penguin-themed movies.

Further, Club Penguin illustrates a form of demographic arbitrage which is becoming increasingly common in the hardware industry. Simply put, it's a lot easier to get people who are doing something for the first time to adopt your way of doing it rather than win converts from another platform. The best example of this out there of this is the conflict between Linux and Microsoft over the One Laptop per Child program, which is planning to ship 5 to 10 million units this year, mostly to individuals who have never previously owned a computer. The OS shipped on those laptops, in all likelihood, will be the favored OS for those individuals for years to come.

In this case, the gameplay style and feeling of Club Penguin will be imprinted on these kids for years to come. I've been a strategy gamer for years, probably due to the fact that I spent the entirety of fourth grade playing SimCity.

Club Penguin is simply capturing a market by lowering the age at which people start playing multiplayer games. In my opinion, it was bound to happen, since the lower side of the 8-14 market has only been served by the "educational games" sector. This implies that gaming is entirely a purchase decision made for them by parents and educators. If a 10 year old girl can decide to wear makeup on her own, why can't she bug her parents to pay for a MMOG?

- Brad

(Supposed) Vision: The Solvency, the Deficiency, and the Opportunity

And now, please welcome a lovely bit of GXC ego:

Despite the incredible cultural solvency inherent in the college-age market, few brands have sought to interact with student society on a truly evocative level. The intricate social networks of college students living together combined with a hunger for new and exciting forms of personal entertainment add up to a potent mix of cultural capital waiting to be realized, compiled and packaged in branded form. The 360-degree, 24/7 onslaught of today’s mediascape leaves college youth awash in cultural ambiguity and information overload without engaging them in meaningful, sustainable, and motivating ways. To engage the modern student social landscape, something decidedly more rigorous and engrossing is quite needed.

The bloated and stagnating world of online “social networking” sites have been limited in their insight and vision by attempting to provide a single social environment for every student user while declining to invest themselves in the actual social makeup of each individual school. And without the specialized architecture to do so, these “social networking” websites have fallen prey to deadly cultural ambiguation, giving their very users little room (or reason) to fully involve themselves in the online offerings these brands have created.

Yet hope still remains! By bringing the vigorous world of casual gaming to the college market, we hope GoCrossCampus will facilitate a new wave of social interaction online for students by providing custom-built gaming engines for every campus in the country. Not only does GoCrossCampus feature a world of dynamic social interplay on-site, the platform also facilitates meaningful and highly motivated interaction between students through the infinite complexities of open strategic gameplay. By uniquely tapping into the wealth of preexisting competitive spirit and team pride inherent on all college campuses, GoCrossCampus succeeds in engaging the student populous not only in the online realm but in the real world of their actual college campus as well. In this sense, GoCrossCampus captures and engages the prime college market with meaningful social interaction, strategic gameplay, and great fun -- overall, an inspiring new opportunity for the business world today.

-MOB