Ursino Francesco - Crowdgaming: The Role of Crowdsourcing in the Video Games Industry

I love a game series. It is called Football Manager. Every year it allows me to manage and coach a football club - which I can choose from thousands of teams - and more than 70.000 Italian players, coaches, athletic trainers, scouts, and so on. It is a series developed by an English studio called Sports Interactive, whose team has got less than 100 members. Considering that every iteration of the series has an annual release, the creation of such large and updated database would be tough for each of the 51 countries involved in the game. For this reason, every year, many months before the release of the new game, a whole team of chief researchers seeks the Internet to find people interested in becoming part of the title scouting team. Every soccer fan in the world can potentially be part of it, as long as they can get the information the chief researcher wants to. In return, every researcher earns the right to be part of the credits of the game, and some of them may have the chance to receive a copy of the title: there is no retribution, but just gratification. Therefore, the massive database of one of the nowadays most beloved gaming franchise is just formed by players becoming proper developers. This is gaming crowdsourcing - and this is what this book is about.

The Internet has changed video games: publishers and developers can reach a wide audience while players possess a power of choice that has largely increased, especially if you look back at 15-20 years ago. Some of the most important dynamics of the internet, such as the word-of-mouth and the viral marketing, transform the players into consumers, developers, and publishers of a video game at the same time.

This book will try to investigate these new forces, which shape a new market and put the player at its center. Among these forces, the crowdsourcing seems the strongest: this mechanism gives the player the ability to influence developers and publishers in various ways. The relation is not unidirectional since the software houses themselves call to action users and fans as well. It can be the choice of a testimonial for a cover or the research for precious information that otherwise can be very hard (and certainly not cheap) to find out.

This collaboration - as I wrote before - works in both directions: the software houses can release tools, or even software platforms, which can be used to customize games and levels, thanks to the cooperative collaboration of communities and forums; this dynamic was just unthinkable before the Internet era.

Among the various ways of crowdsourcing, the crowdfunding seems to be the most important. Thanks to this mechanism, every developer can raise the proper amount of money to develop a project. The change is radical: even the smallest creator of the humblest, independent video game could have the possibility to create his own video game, thanks to the contribution of the players. However, this does not mean that every creator can earn from his games, but it could be the chance.

We will face these topics through the book, which consists of three chapters: the first introduces the general concept of crowdsourcing and the primary processes this mechanism manifests itself through.

The second chapter focuses on the crowdfunding and on the structure of this kind of fundraising campaigns. The final pages of this part look into the search for quantitative aspects that can bind together the most important projects that have been funded by players so far. It is important to say that this book is not about how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign, and it does not contain magical recipes: the purpose is to focus on how crowdsourcing and gaming coexist from an empirical point of view.

The third chapter includes a brief analysis of the first significant crowdfunding campaign in gaming, such as the Broken Age one. Again, it is not an in-depth analysis, but just a starting point, useful to underline some of the most important aspects of the relationship between crowdsourcing and video games.

Every chapter includes digressions of different nature: these sections are not necessarily linked to the central theme of the book, but they help to better understand the video games market. We will talk about pricing strategies, the role and the evolution of information and communication tools and lots of other things.

This book is the sum of my experience as an editor for specialized video games websites, and my academic formation as well. It is mostly addressed to whoever has a certain knowledge of video games, but also to those who are interested in the socio-economic dynamics determined by gaming and by the Internet. If you belong to the first category, this book can represent the occasion to look at video games from a different perspective; otherwise - if you belong to the second - it can be a compelling opportunity to investigate a new culture and an artistic world, which is worth your attention.

Why on the green Earth of God should a guy spend a sleepless night of June on his own, in the middle of a hot summer, watching a monitor? A valid (and possibly not creepy at all) answer, if you are not American, can be video games.

As a matter of fact, June is the month of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (so-called E3), one the most important event focused on video games. On this occasion, every major personality of the market participates to the event set in Los Angeles, ready to show what is coming next in the video games world. So, if you are not attending the several arenas of the conferences, but you are still interested in the matter, the only chance left is to take your PC, tablet, or smartphone, and watch the streaming of the several meetings that precede the event. Since the conferences take place in Los Angeles, it means that every gamer that belongs to the EMEA area has to stay up all night to follow them, thus this is the explanation for the creepy incipit of this chapter.

On the night of June, 15th 2015, the big screen of the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena - the location of the Sony conference - turned green and white, and drew the Kickstarter logo; the crowdfunding made its entrance in the temple of high-budget video games, thanks to the announce of the arrival of Shenmue 3, one of the most anticipated games of the last ten years. To develop the game, though, the developer Yu Suzuki was asking for the help of users and fans: The destiny of Shenmue is in your hands, said Suzuki, and his message was promptly received. Only 102 minutes after the initial announcement the crowdfunding campaign of Shenmue 3 was counting $ 1 million. Nine hours later, the count reached $ 2 million.

What allowed a 15-year-old video game series to achieve such a great result in such a brief time? Moreover, what was the real role of the players? If you want to answer these questions, the starting point is the introduction of the Internet. Indeed, all the mechanisms we are going to describe might be impossible, and even difficult to imagine, if there was no web connection.