Gaming isn’t a niche hobby any more: It’s become the defining consumer medium of our time and offers enormous value to companies of all sizes, as this DLD26 session, moderated by Christian Teichmann (Hubert Burda Media), shows.
“You have close to three and a half billion people that play video games almost daily”, Bastian Bergmann, Co-Founder of Solsten and author of Press Play, points out in his opening remarks. “This is bigger than the populations of China and India combined.”
Companies that embrace gaming can dramatically grow their business, Bergmann notes. “Everybody plays”, he says. “There’s real money in it. The industry is roughly $200 billion.” One example: It took fashion house Burberry 22 seconds to “sell out an entire collection of limited edition characters” in a virtual world, earning the company some $225,000 in revenue.
Johanna Pirker, professor of N‑Dimensional User Experience at TUM, emphasizes that the world of gaming still suffers from outdated stereotypes. “It’s still not part of the culture or of the arts”, she says – unfairly, in her opinion. “Games are art, games are culture”, Pirker stresses. “The games medium is extremely complex”, spanning art, culture, education and even dementia‑fighting research.
Watch the video to explore this session in detail.
