Routledge Video Game Marketing: A student textbook

The video game industry has been one of the fastest-growing cultural phenomena of our times with market conditions that demand a specific skill set from its marketers. To a new generation of "indie gamers", being a game developer isn’t just about design and production, a successful video game demands entrepreneurial skills and astute business acumen. The creators need to know what their customers want, how to reach those customers and how to sell to them. Video Game Marketing: A student textbook is for development students or aspiring developers who want to know how to promote and sell the results of their efforts. This book is a much-needed guide to: • the essentials of marketing strategy; • video games as products or services; • marketing research for game development; • branding video games; • marketing through game: gamification, advergames. Replete with pedagogy to aid learning such as objectives and discussion questions for each chapter, this book is all that aspiring video game developers will need to unleash the potential of their games. Review ‘The divide between videogame marketing and videogame development has stood cavernous. In this text, Zackariasson and Dymek simultaneously forge new connections between these worlds and bridge gaps between games as art and games as business. In doing so, the book contributes significantly to our understanding of games and videogames as cultural products rather than simply "toys" or software sold for entertainment. Videogames are serious business.’ - Casey O’Donnell, Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Information, Michigan State University, USA About the Author Peter Zackariasson is an Associate Professor in Marketing at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since early 2000 he has studied the video game industry, its production and consumption, which has resulted in numerous articles, books and conference papers. Mikolaj Dymek is an Associate Professor at Mid Sweden University, Sweden, where he researches marketing communications. He is also a consumer PR analyst and is co-editor of a new volume of work on the business of gamification, also due in 2016 from Routledge.