15 Jul 2009 | Louise Gaynor

What to look out for in gaming in 2009

Fresh from 2009’s E3 Gaming Expo, Louise Gaynor, board director, Target Media, predicts this year’s big launches and market trends for the gaming industry…

This year’s E3 Expo saw a return to form for the most illustrious gaming industry event. Huge announcements from industry giants including Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and Activision had everybody talking. The sheer scale of this year’s show was accentuated by the appearances of some of music, film and sport’s biggest stars, including Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Leonardo DiCaprio , Jay Z, Eminem and Pete Sampras. This event was a nod to the massive progress the gaming industry has made over the last three years in terms of offering a mass market, multimedia approach to the entertainment industry.

Like most media sectors, Christmas is the most active retailing period for the games industry and in the advertising world everyone is beginning to look towards the end of the year and to predict what the stand-out performers will be in 2009. This year’s E3 Expo gave us an excellent glimpse of which gaming properties we can expect to see flying off the shelves.

Show highlights

The most exciting pre-show announcement was from Microsoft and Lionhead Studios: the motion sensitive, AI ‘Project Natal’ for the XBox. Introduced by legendary film director, Steven Spielberg, onlookers were treated to a glimpse into the future of gaming. Combining an RGB camera, depth sensor, microphone and custom processor all in one device, the hardware should revolutionise gaming and bring us one step closer to full-blown virtual reality.

Sony had a few technological leaps of their own to unveil, with demonstrations of their Playstation 3 Motion Controller and the PSPgo – the first console to abolish cartridges, discs and UMDs by being exclusively a downloadable software-led format. In addition, major game launches such as Final Fantasy XIV Online and The Agent as console exclusives will also have gone a long way to reinforcing industry inferences that Sony is back on track and ready to regain its place as the number one first-party publisher in the near future.

How and when will media be used for games releases this year?

So which media will attract the ad-spend of the games publishers in the run-up to Christmas 2009? Online and television will again lead most Christmas campaigns due to the mutual compatibility that these media can achieve. In 2008 over 70% of games media budget for the top 20 publishers was spent on television campaigns: this will remain the case in 2009, albeit with a few significant changes. Only quality commercial games products and brands such as PES and FIFA will work successfully on television and as certain console product cycles mature and more product of less quality is released on the market, television sorts the wheat from the chaff. The major gaming players are strategically moving their media-spend towards a pre-launch weighting to ensure a greater share of voice in the marketplace and to ensure that this early cut-through prepares the best results ahead for launch week. Both Assassins Creed and Call of Duty, which launch in November, aired appointment to view spots on television as early as May this year. In the gaming industry the implementation of heavily weighted pre-launch marketing plans had not been seen before this year.

What properties to look out for this Christmas

In addition to the ever-popular PES and FIFA, both of which launch slightly before Christmas, keep an eye-out for the following Christmas releases: