Meeting Rich Reagan

           Throughout Rich’s presentation he was very well-spoken and was funny enough to keep the audience interested, not that we weren’t already interested to begin with. He went on to discuss how games are developing and how the video game market has to adapt to that changing market. If we can’t adapt to the market then our video games will go out of style, much like the cassette player did once MP3 players were produced. Due to smart phones more and more people, who aren’t avid gamers, are getting easy access to a variety of video games. This opens up the video game market to many casual gamers such as the older generations and those who are just barely coming into video games, so these games must be marketed to this new audience as well as interesting those already familiar with video games.

An interesting trend that Steve pointed out is that games are beginning to go ‘freemium’, which means that the game is released for free and either some content of the game requires money to buy or the game just repeatedly asks for appropriate donations for their effort. With the video game genre expanding to reach broader audiences the freemium style of producing games is becoming more prevalent. But by going with the freemium route those video games must be fun, or addicting enough, to make people willing to pay for that content. For example, the player could farm for hours to get a decent quality item or they could pay a small sum of real-world money to acquire an item of superior or unique quality. Doing this perfectly means that the player is willing to make that small micro-transaction because they believe that it is beneficial for them to do so. On the other hand competition drives freemium purchases. By having players compete amongst each other they’ll be much more open to giving money in order to gain an edge or some aesthetical value that the other players may not have.

Given all this information, I learned how we, as developers, must learn to view the changing tides of consumer and make fun games that reach out to those audiences while still being profitable to our company.