According to an interesting news article posted earlier this month, there
is an enormous untapped potential in the Serious Games Market - an underused strategic
opportunity for majors and indies.
In a piece for VentureBeat (VB) dated
November 12 and titled There’s Serious Potential in
Serious Games, Shivani Lamba describes how the world is being transformed by play
and how Serious Games are increasingly being used across industries.
“Their influence is being felt across healthcare, where games are
delivering neurodevelopmental assessments to children, to defense, where
military simulations in virtual reality add an unprecedented, tactile layer to
training,” she says.
Founder and CEO at Brightlobe, a
startup that is developing a game-based platform to support children’s growth
and development, Shivani Lamba highlights
the fact that Serious Games are more ambitious than ever, their developer
community is growing, and the sector will be worth just over $9 billion by
2023. She cites examples of conferences and other annual gatherings across the
United States and Europe formed to bring industry specialists and developers
together: Games for Health Europe entering its tenth year and Games for Change
hosting its 17th festival in 2020. I would add the 12th edition of
the International Serious Play Conference and the 15th anniversary of
the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge next year, among a few others.
Lamba then breaks down opportunities that developers can take advantage of if they craft a strategy around Serious Games. This breakdown ranges from adding a Serious Games layer to an existing game to finding a serious application for your game to attract cross-industry partnerships or collaborations:
“To start, adding a Serious Games layer to an existing game could present another revenue stream for developers looking for ethical and even impactful alternatives to controversial microtransactions,” says Lamba. “The addition of a layer focused on education may seemingly present challenges in the form of increased development time and associated overheads, the advantage to retooling or repurposing an existing codebase means a second product offering with a potentially new audience.”
“Finding a serious application for your game could attract cross-industry partnerships or collaborations. For indie studios especially, building associations with other, notable brands is tremendously helpful in earning visibility in a crowded marketplace and among new audiences. Assessing a game’s utility elsewhere is also inherently an exercise in identifying potential in a product that may have otherwise not been identified,” she adds.
Lamba points out that Serious Games are also an opportunity to drive innovation within an organization. Adding a serious layer to an existing game provides a tremendous opportunity to tinker with an existing codebase; or use a studio’s IP in a new format for rapid prototyping.
“While Serious Games have often been seen as a pursuit of industry outsiders, this wasn’t always the case. Game developers and publishers now have a tremendous opportunity to augment or build out serious products and attract a wider and diversified audience in the process,” Shivani Lamba concludes.
Please find the complete article at https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/12/theres-serious-potential-in-serious-games/