Task 3 - Financial, Industry and Market Trends

Finance

Financial planning is an ongoing process where sensible decisions are discussed and used about money which can allow to to achieve goals in life.

Financial planning is a very important process that could lead to making a company more successful as they can stick to a budget of money without going over the limit and achieving a great job for whatever task needs to be completed. This could also lead to companies gaining better profit as the product can be sold which allows them to grow in population and

There are many financial issues in the games industry which can be caused in many different ways. The developer of the game will always earn the least amount of money considering that they are the last to earn the share, whether it is an online flash game or an official game published in the store. This is because the game is firstly produced by the developer, passed onto the publisher, then the distributor and the the retailer/ seller. This means that the product will finally end up with the consumer or the buyer who actually sends the money back down the line where it will eventually reach the developer again.


For example, if the specific game was "Need for Speed: The Run",

• The developer would be "EA Black Box" who would firstly send out the product first and receive the income last,
• The publisher would be "Electronic Arts" who receives the product after the developer and they would collect the income after the distributor,
• The distributor in this case would be the Royal Mail
• The retailer is GAME who sells the product to the consumer and receives the first share of income.
• The consumer is myself who is going to give the money to the retailer and receive the product.

When it comes to online gaming in the games industry, the process becomes more complicated and the companies in this process are barely recognised. This diagram shows us how the product travel through the online system and the money sent and received. We can see that the developer sends out the game to the online gaming website which then ends up with the consumer. The online gaming website receives money from the consumers as they now have the product.

Market trends

There are three types of trends: secular, primary and secondary. 

• A secular trend means that it will last or has lasted for a very long time. 
• A primary trend means that is will last or lasted for a long time but not too long compared to secular
• A secondary trend means that the game has had very little time in the trending spotlight.

Market trends in the games industry are high in demand within games. The publishers and developers focus on these the most and the consumers of the product will find it a lot more appealing. Trends are important to the games industry and the consumers because it shows the type of genre and trend the game is and if the trend is secular, then it is more likely to be bought. This obviously means that the companies involved with the game will gain a bigger profit because the game will sell more. Games associated with mobiles through stores such as the App Store and Android has been the most recent game trend considering that a lot of the games downloaded and play are cost-free meaning that they do not cost any money to buy. This includes games such as Flappy Bird, Jump Nuts, Twist and many more. These apps are completely free to play, they don't take up too much space and they make their profit through ads which pop up every once in a while. You can get rid of these ads because they can be quite annoying by actually buying the app but not many people really want to do that.

However, there are other free games, which are completely ad-free and they cost nothing at all. These are called "Freemium" games, but in these games, there is most likely a store where you can spend real life money to upgrade certain aspects. Some examples of these games are: Love Live! School Idol Festival, Clash of Clans and 8 Ball Pool. In Love Live! School Idol Festival, you can buy an ingame currency which in this game are called "love gems" which allow you to open crates,which are very similar to CSGO, where you are guaranteed to unlock new idols/ characters. You can gain love gems by playing the game regularity but it takes quite a long time to gain a big enough amount to open a crates so a large majority of people just buy them to speed up the process and hope to receive the idol they want the most. Although this may seem cheap at the start, the price will become more and more expensive as these types of games become very addictive and can empty your wallet fairly quickly.

DLC aims to extend a games story further or add extra maps/ things to do within a game. Some of the DLC out there could be really good and be worth the money whilst other games just aren't really worth it considering what you actually get after purchasing the DLC. For example, back in the day when I used to play Call of Duty, there was quite a lot of DLC for the multiplayer in the game. I usually consisted of about 4-5 new maps and maybe even and extra classic revamped map. Depending on which Call of Duty it was, you would also get a map specially for "Zombies" which is a very popular game mode. There was about 4 DLCs every Call of Duty game which each costed about £10. Now this sounds fairly cheap when you think about it, but when you add it all up, (£40-50 for the game + £10 + £10 + £10 + £10 = £90), it doesn't seem so cheap anymore. This helps the companies that have worked on the game profit wise but I think they are slightly ripping the consumers off a little bit. They did introduce the "Season Pass" which allowed you to download all the content which costed about £30 which saved you around £10 which made it slightly better and more organised but I feel that each DLC should have costed around £5 each to make it more reasonable to the consumer.