Logitech’s recent foray into the New Zealand gaming community, by sponsoring a local online gaming team, is a positive sign both for the market and for other companies looking to tap into this fairly lucrative market.
The gaming market has for years been a hard market to break into for larger corporations. Smaller, more specialised organisations like Alienware, Voodoo PC and to an extent, Auckland based Playtech has put their focus towards it with great success.
The gaming community in a small country like New Zealand is inherently hard to reach. Most of the communication is based around the web, with an emphasis on discussion groups and of course the game themselves.
When it comes to the actual games, there are several successful developers out there like Electronic Arts and Take2. Unfortunately, it is a crowded market and games companies going bust has become a daily news source. The margins in the games themselves are quite low, but can be circumvented with add on services like monthly subscriptions (as with some massive multiplayer online games), or the addition of ‘expansion packs’ that are based on the same source code and 3d engine, with new content.
This brings us to the hardware market and in particular system assemblers. Alienware and Voodoo PC were both champions in this market, and both have recently been bought by massive IT organisations Dell and Hewlett Packard. The companies have obviously spotted a new market where high end performance parts are key, and acted on that. Commodore, the company made famous for its C64 and Amiga machines in the 1980’s has announced that it will enter the high end gaming market and is showcasing its models at CeBit later this year The problem with the assembly of high end computers is that the margins are, again, quite small. It therefore becomes a volume game where if you are not in the top three, there is little hope.
In parts of Asia, computer gaming has reached a professional level where competitors work full time and get paid thereafter. There is little hope that gaming will ever reach this level here. Competitions like X-LAN are doing theirs to promote gaming by arranging LAN parties with prizes to the winners, but so far there has been little corporate backing of such events. Getting ones name out there is the first step in capturing a market that is on the cutting edge of hardware and serving as a suitable demographic (mostly young males).
Logitech has gone about this in a good way, by letting the gaming community itself be the advertising vehicle for the company’s products. It is, as said earlier, a small step. But it is a step in the right direction.
