What the video game industry can teach us about starting up

In the span of 4 days, Pokémon Go has become the biggest mobile game in the US, cashing $1.6 million in daily revenue and 7.5 million downloads.

Earlier in June, Warcraft: The Beginning hit the theatres and ended up with more than $430 million in revenue, while May saw Angry Birds: The Movie rack up to $341 million.

Pokémon, Warcraft, and Angry Birds all share a specific set of traits, which enabled the transition from game release to franchise. These traits, when looked at from an analytical angle, gives us good reasons why the video game industry can be used as a compass for the best and worst practices in many fields, especially in IT and entrepreneurship.

1. By focusing on the user experience

There are two reasons why video games are very unique products:

1. Video games are the only digital products (and maybe the only products) that must involve technology, economics, ergonomics, psychology, sociology, culture, and arts, to successfully deliver a comprehensive user experience.
2. Video games are the only digital products aiming for comprehensive user experience as an exclusive end-goal.

Movie goers do not care about user inputs, bookworms won’t mind if illustrations are bad, and fine painting amateurs won’t castigate a painting for incorporating the wrong sound track.

Gamers, though, will give a title a thorough inspection, from frame rate to voice acting, from iteration cycle to sub-plots, and will only acclaim only the most flawless results.

That said, once a title has earned its fame, and especially if its overall quality can be maintained (and renewed, for gamers delight in novelty), it will generate an emotional bond that can span over several generations. After all, Mario is indeed more famous than Mickey Mouse.

Takeaway #1

User experience is key. It is holistic, it is empathetic. Don’t overlook the development of a great user experience.

2. Building a community around the game

Warcraft: Orc and Humans is 22 years old, just a year older than the Pokémon franchise. While Angry Birds is only 7 years old, it still has been a relatively long time since its release -the same naturally goes for the two other titles.

Such longevity has given the games’ creators time to delve deeper into their universe, and grow their user bases around the following elements:

• Competition, letting players compare their achievement and skills.
• Interaction, opening several parallel communication channels to open the game world to a wider public.
• Lore, by giving their franchise a backstory and developing in-world characters and interaction, as a way to create a community of aficionados whose knowledge sets them apart from ‘laypeople’.

3. Timing is everything

Conclusion