Game Trends as Social Inflection Points
Why every new game release is a new opportunity for rapid platform adoption
Think about every time you’ve joined a new network. It’s very likely that you joined Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram when trying to make friends after the school year started. You may have joined Nextdoor when you moved into a new neighborhood. Reddit, Twitter, or Telegram when you really wanted to talk about a certain thing that happened in the world, or Linkedin when finding your professional network to connect with right out of college.
These are all events that drastically change your habits and open you up to behavioral changes, such as adopting new platforms. In research, it’s also known as the habit discontinuity hypothesis. Below is a chart of platforms with wide adoption, and some of the social inflection points that drives the growth of new users coming in.
There are 2 types of inflection points described — Synchronous ones and asynchronous. In a synchronous inflection point, the habit change happens for everyone at the same time, e.g. kicking off freshman year at college or graduation. The rate of adoption on these products, if paired with strong retention and growth strategies, is often extremely high.
For asynchronous inflection points, the event does not happen for many people at the same time. Instead, they happen on an individual basis, such as moving to a new neighborhood or traveling somewhere new.
When building products, it is useful to understand when a user adopts it, as it helps you focus on the features to focus on to validate assumptions. If you are building a social network, discovering people quickly based on relevant information, and making it easy to connect is important. If you are building a marketplace-like product, it is important to understand when your supply-side’s social inflection point is, and when your demand-side social inflection point is, and focus down on those areas. When you pair that with great product retention, the chances of success in building a network go up.
Growth in Games
Every game release is a new synchronized social inflection point. Users seek new communities, ways to communicate and connect or find information on specific topics quickly. Therefore, rates of early adoptions on well-designed, non-fragmented gaming-focused products is high. But if this was true, why don’t we see a new platform emerge every time a new game comes out? Every game has lots of different tools that power it, and they are adopted very quickly. Because of fragmentation.
For example, when playing League of Legends, you might use platforms like Blitz, Mobalytics or OP.GG. But the most valuable networks are built when you are building products that ride the wave of social inflection points in a non-fragmented manner, independent of game, publisher, or platform. These tools may end up growing into networks long-term, when they can lose dependence on individual games, the game stays relevant, and the company can focus on specific areas that matter across all games, but it will take significantly longer than a platform without the same level of dependence. Sites like Fortnite Tracker and OP.GG are doing really interesting work in this area with things like OP Talk and Tracker Network.
At Medal, we’re somewhere in the middle. Our supply side is platform constrained because building capture software that is easy to use is timely. It is, however, not constrained from the viewership side or from the game side, meaning it is a reasonably achievable task to get to a point of being able to be non-fragmented over time. Twitch went the route of mainly distributing live-stream video data regardless of origin, and only recently launches it’s first creator-focused app.
This is why you will likely not see a publisher build a product that replaces Discord, Reddit or Twitch. Their platforms are the go-to place for new discovery of communities and content because it can maneuver across operating systems, publishers and platforms quicky, without being bound to any single platform for the demand and/or supply.
Marketplaces
Looking at platforms with a very clear supply and demand-side separation, things get slightly more complicated, as you have different inflection points for the supply and demand side. Twitch’s growth on the viewership side might start when a user is trying to get better at a game or is interested in a new game coming out. Then, eventually, they start retaining by getting increasingly interested in a game or getting more involved in the communities of creators they are interested in.
From the creator side, the inflection point is likely when a user has reached a level of skill in a game, is great with communities, or is good at games in general, where that person believes other people may be interested in watching along.
When you bring those two together in a way that isn’t fragmented (e.g. bound to a single platform or game), it increases rate of adoption, and that’s why you see Discord, Twitch, and Reddit able to grow to an enormous size, where platforms focused just on PC or a single game may not be able to.
At Medal, we’re currently working on a product that makes some of these trends easier to understand in real-time. Feel free to DM me on Twitter for early access.
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