Expanding your offering, becoming more appealing to suppliers, and using other mediums to connect with potential customers are all ways in which your e-commerce can learn from the gaming industry.
Whether it’s on mobile devices, consoles, or online platforms, there’s no doubt that gaming is an immensely popular pastime across all ages. Due to its huge popularity and accessibility, video games have evolved into a gigantic industry which can cater to everyone looking for entertainment.
Gaming has inevitably taken to the internet like a duck to water, utilising it as a platform to advance and expand its offering, having done so successfully for well over a decade now. Today, we’re going to have a look at the gaming industry to see what factors have enabled it to become so strong as well as what your e-commerce brand can learn from its success.
Even the niche offerings are diversified
One of the major propellants of one of the largest cultural shifts in gaming, the poker boom of 2003, was the introduction of online poker. Suddenly, everyone with an internet connection and a computer could play the popular card game using real money whenever they wanted. The space became incredibly competitive, with hundreds of new online poker websites popping up to meet the huge demand.
To hold onto their audience and appeal to other players, websites had to adapt the game of poker to make it better and diversified to appeal to more people and offer new ways to play. Now, online poker websites have many different ways to play, so much so that lobbies have to have filter options for players to quickly find the type of poker that they wish to play. The format of play has also been mixed up, with many different kinds of tournaments taking place, such as satellite tournaments, freeroll tournaments, and high stakes tournaments.
In the grand scheme of the industry, poker is niche, so the major websites found a way to diversify the offering in order for it to appeal to more players and offer something different to existing players to ensure that they don’t tire of the game. Your e-commerce offering can follow suit: be sure to offer a diverse range of goods and services, regardless of how niche the product may be, to expand your appeal.
Reeling in the best will attract the rest
Steam desperately needs a competitor, but Epic making Metro Exodus an exclusive is not going to help – https://t.co/4kYS321wEG pic.twitter.com/XlvEgNNsXY
— Rock Paper Shotgun (@rockpapershot) January 28, 2019
There’s a platform war currently being waged among PC gamers, with Valve’s dominant force Steam being challenged by Epic Games’ Epic Store. In the beginning, the Epic Store appeared to be little more than a fly buzzing around Steam, but then it started to land highly-anticipated triple-A games as platform exclusives.
To achieve this, Epic Games offered developers 88% of their game’s revenue, taking only 12% without any tiers or thresholds. By comparison to Steam’s tiered system and baseline take of 30% of the revenue, the Epic Store became far more appealing.
In landing so many big names, more gamers have started to defect to Epic not just to play those games, but also explore other titles offered by Epic. The moves show that you don’t have to simply offer products at lower face value to draw in customers; bringing in recognised brands by offering them a better deal behind the scenes can also work in your favour.
Utilise other mediums
Nintendo is one of the biggest game companies in the world and likely has the best consumer relationship of the three console giants. Throughout the year, since 2011, the company will live stream a Nintendo Direct, which lets players and fans know what’s coming up soon.
The Nintendo Directs are so effective that Sony’s PlayStation has recently started to do something similar with their State of Play live stream announcements. Rather than relying on email news blasts or online reviews, these companies are offering another way for people to connect and stay connected to the brand through the incredibly popular medium of online video. Many areas of e-commerce could follow the lead of Nintendo to showcase products, offers, and tease future products.