One thing that’s important to remember as the industry pushes forward is that while the actual game is the most obvious content, it’s not necessarily your actual business. In the end what makes your money is the real business that you’re in, and we’re giving the content away.

Newspapers have, for the better part of the last century at least, been using news as an effective way to deliver ads into their reader’s homes.   That’s not to say that the reporting isn’t a key feature of the user experience, but in this article on why newspapers are failing, there’s a very interesting point:

Remember “shoppers,” the poorly designed throwaway publications filled with tacky little ads? Daily newspapers are high-end shoppers. They spent a lot of money on original content to class up the operation and give people a reason to ask for the ads to be delivered. Long before the web displayed the power and leverage of critical mass, newspapers benefited from it; once you got the franchise in your particular locale, you tried not to stir up trouble, because it just distracted you from time better spent cashing checks.

The newspapers had found that the could afford to lose money on distribution by making it up in ad-revenue, along with user subscriptions. Sound familiar?

Luckily for Social Games the user revenue portion of the model looks to be rapidly outpacing advertising as a key factor in monetization. That’s important because, like many things on the internet, the cost of generating a new, and more effectively targeted platform for advertising is so cheap that unless you can deliver a focused demographic in large numbers, ad revenue is always going to be minimal.

Games also have another advantage, which is that our relationship to our community is more explicit. News  media is often disdainful of the fact that they were ever a “social media”. They think that they own their audience, and are pushing hard to get government to enforce what is, at it’s heart, a social relationship between the people who make media and the people who consume it.  And once you think you’re speaking for your audience instead of to them, you’ve already begun to unravel the bond with your customer.

So why is gameplay imoportant? Because while gameplay may not be the core of your business, it is the heart of the relationship with your audience.  The experience you are giving them is the reason that they engage with you each day, and are willing to give you their money.

And because we have such strong methods of tracking our users, we can more effectively streamline that relationship.

The always entertaining TechDirt has something to say on that subject, that is, I think, relevant to those who may not see the future of gaming that’s rapidly approaching:

The problem is that it’s not the reporting that’s attracting the community. It’s the community. For way too long, the newspapers have ignored or diminished the role of the community. They were forgetting that, in the end, it really is the community that’s their "product." They sell the attention of that community. But, for years, they had little to no competition in doing so. That meant they could basically ignore serving the community… and they did. Now that there are sites that actually do serve the community, people prefer going to them than the sites that treated the "community" like lower class riffraff to be kept away. Funny how that works.

Games have existed in a similar vacuum for the last twenty years, but the outlets for the old fashioned single-player experiences are growing smaller and smaller every day.