While the video game industry has shown incredible growth in revenues over the past decade, and is forecast by Grand View Research to expand at a 12.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2030, the industry could be missing out on billions of dollars of “lost” revenue.
New research from Blue Owl Ai shows that, for just 10 titles released over a year ago, a whopping $1.5 billion worth of missed monetization opportunities may have been realized.
The ten titles, and the estimated “missed” revenue, in order of lost opportunity, are:
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: $181 million
- Halo Infinite: $174 million
- Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War: $173 million
- Resident Evil 3 Remake: $171 million
- Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time: $167 million
- Spider-Man: $167 million
- The Avengers: $139 million
- Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: $135 million
- Red Dead Redemption 2: $124 million
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: $123 million
Jeff Brazell, the CEO of Blue Owl Ai pointed out that, “Video games {are} a hypercompetitive industry, with millions of titles vying for the gamer’s dollar.
“It’s hard to break through the noise to make gamers aware of your title and get them to consider it. It’s much harder moving gamers from consideration to purchase or download.”
He went on, “It’s critical to continuously gather intelligence on market interest along with gamer attitudes, motivations, and preferences at each stage of the marketing funnel.
“In Blue Owl Ai, we see the profile of gamers interested in a given title changes over time. That means marketing messages that resonated and persuaded a month ago may not be effective today.
“Agile marketers use profile intelligence to change their messages to resonate with and persuade gamers who are ready to buy. And, it doesn’t have to take long.”
Right now, the majority of video game revenue and monetization efforts are concentrated in retail game purchases, digital game downloads, subscriptions, microtransactions, additional downloadable content, loot boxes, season passes, player trading and advertising.
But there could be a new monetization technology on the horizon, far different from current efforts, which could help balloon revenues much higher. We’ll get to it in a moment.
First, if the Blue Owl Ai data are correct, these ten titles alone are missing out on massive revenue opportunities, simply by not marketing themselves currently and correctly.
Take Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, for example. Its publisher, Ubisoft, has said the title has generated over $1 billion in revenue to date. If it has indeed missed out on $181 million in “lost” revenue, that would constitute as much as 18% extra money left on the table. That’s clearly a huge, missed opportunity.
As we noted earlier, Brazell said, “… the profile of gamers interested in a given title changes over time. That means marketing messages that resonated and persuaded a month ago may not be effective today.”
But even if all game publishers could maximize their marketing messages and achieve 100% efficiency from the current monetization systems (which is, of course, impossible), there could still be perhaps tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue yet to be captured…
And that revenue could come from in-game eCommerce.
Now, we’re not simply talking about current monetization efforts like microtransactions (virtual items) or loot boxes (virtual items). No, we’re talking about real eCommerce being conducted within video games.
This new monetization technology (an in-game eCommerce platform) hopes to allow gamers to buy, sell or trade real things inside of their favorite games, while playing them.
It’d be akin to what we see today with the internet where you can purchase products, goods, and services from your favorite websites, rather than going to brick-and-mortar stores.
This in-game technology hopes to achieve the same end goal as the entertainment platforms used for eCommerce – websites. But instead, the new entertainment platform for eCommerce could be video games.
Could a technology like this help bolster monetization efforts of video game publishers? Will billions of dollars be up for grabs?
Find out more HERE
Or, read more about the Blue Owl Ai report, HERE