An Interview with Ned Sherman, CEO of Digital Media Wire

This past week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ned Sherman of Digital Media Wire regarding this week’s upcoming NY Games Conference. I’m hitting the Big Apple soon to cover the event, but in the meantime, take a look at this industry pro’s insight. Ned had some intriguing news regarding what to expect from the conference, as well as the future of gaming in general.

GotGame: The NY Games Conference website says that it’s featuring elements of your cutting-edge Millennials Conference series. Could you talk more about this series?

Ned Sherman: We undertook a study of the Millennial Generation and how they interact with technology and media today. The Millennial Generation is defined as anyone who is born between 1982 and 2000…we published a source book with about 6 or 7 articles on different issues related to consumer marketing to this generation. Then, we had 3 conferences that we did in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto focusing on themes of marketing to them, and at each conference, we had a panel of teens where we asked them what their consumption habits are, and what they think of how entertainment companies attempt to market to them, and it was just fascinating. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap between what we would hear from these kids and what’s going on in the gaming industry.

There’s a recent statistic that I read that said 97% of teens today play video games. That wasn’t the case in my generation at all. Being a gamer back when I grew up probably meant you were slightly nerdy and you hung out in your basement playing games, and now everybody’s a gamer, you know?

That was one of the takeaways we had from study[ing] the generation, and with this conference coming up in New York, we decided to pull some of the aspects of that conference, so we do have a teen panel, which is being moderated by C&R Research that has a teen study group, and they’re doing that on the first day of the conference.

How will the New York Games Conference differ from the one that you host in L.A.?

There’s various overlap, and some of the topics are identical…we did pick up some themes that seemed to be quite relevant to the New York market. For example, we have a discussion on the military in games…that came to us from a group called Stripes GAMER, and I believe they’re based in New Jersey. They’re building a community of news, information, and social networking for members of the U.S. Military or veterans who are still into gaming….I didn’t know much about what the military was doing other than American Army…I knew it was a pretty successful game used by the military as a recruitment tool, and is more controversial as well, but then to find out that their list of members in this community is somewhere around 10 million….we thought that was an interesting and relevant topic for the time right now.

We also added a topic on piracy in games, and the presenter is Matt Mason, who has written a very interesting book on entertainment piracy in general, and we’ve definitely never covered it at our games conference before, but I think it is an issue becoming more important for the industry, and making sure the industry addresses it in the right way and doesn’t make the same mistakes that the music industry has made, in kind of turning fans and consumers into defendants in litigation.

We also tried in this event to bring in companies that are based in New York City, so we have an outreach to the IGDA, New York Chapter, and brought in some smaller companies like Large Animal Games based in New York…to Atari, who is also based out there, to companies like Turbine that are based up in Boston. There really are a lot of companies in the New York area that are involved in gaming and wanted to make sure that they were involved as well.

Kyle “kSharp” Miller of the Championship Gaming Series is being interviewed at the event, and I was wondering if it was important for game companies to be in touch with that demographic, and what specifically can be learned from them.

I think…for people in the industry to understand the role that the professional gamer might play as kind of a leader in the generation [is] important. We’ve had Fatal1ty in our LA Games Conference, and I’ve always been pretty fascinated with the things that he has to say. To hear him talk about the extent of his training and how his training is not just kind of the mental and the game techniques that you’d expect, but it also involves quite an extensive physical regimen. He works out and plays tennis regularly, and thinks that that’s all important and is one of the reasons he’s been able to be so successful. There really needs to be a connection between mind and body. I think you get a particularly good insight into the generation when you bring people like Fatal1ty and kSharp to the event…and hear directly from them.

It’s also kind of fascinating to think that there could be a career option to be a professional gamer. It didn’t exist when I was growing up, and didn’t exist 5 years ago. Fatal1ty’s really the first person to succeed at it, and now, with the Championship Gaming Series, having leagues all over the U.S., there must be over 100 professional gamers now in the U.S., if not more.

What aspects of this conference are you most excited about (specific guests, panels, etc.)?

There are a few things. I think that I’m really interested to hear from John Smedley from Sony Online Entertainment. He’s the president, and he’s going to be keynoting in the morning on the 26th, and he’s going to be talking about the future of MMOG. His specific topic is “Reinventing the Online Game,” and honestly, I don’t know what he’s going to say, but the topic alone…is a great one, and we can expect there to be some really interesting thoughts coming out of that.

I also think that there’s a panel he’s going to be on following that called “The Future of MMOGs” that I think will be really interesting…a good mix of people on there: Min Kim from Nexon America, being able to direct some of what’s going on beyond the boundaries of the United States in countries like Korea and China, which are more advanced than we are in the game culture, and the quality of games there.

I think the “Games as a Marketing Tool” is something that people have been talking about for quite a while, and as you can see, we have quite an amazing panel here, with Activision, Electronic Arts, Double Fusion, Massive, Sulake, Championship Gaming Series…I mean, these are the people that are really on the ground doing it, and I’m interested to hear how that whole area is developing, and it seems to me that advertising budgets are slowly being moved over to digital entertainment. Games as an advertising medium are starting to be taken more seriously. I’m interested in hearing what’s working, and what are some of the challenges…what’s not working, how our consumers are reacting to games and sponsored contests, and so forth.

I know that a lot of the panels deal with the future of gaming, and I’m curious where you think it’s headed. Is there a specific game you can point to that demonstrates where the future of gaming is?

It’s hard to pinpoint any one game, or really any one genre, but I think that one of the biggest trends that I see is that the gamer demographic is broadening, and that we’ve seen that through…and I might, rather than answer your question by mentioning a specific game, maybe mention some technologies that I think are having the greatest impact: the Wii, of course, has really changed and opened up games to a much broader audience from older people to very young people, and, of course, we’re seeing a lot more women gamers of all ages…so I think what “casual gaming”…has done for the industry…is one of the biggest trends, and as before, we talked about Millennials, and how 97% of them are playing games…as they grow older, they’ll continue playing games, and I think that this is really a very significant change that we’re seeing right now–that games really are going mainstream.

I know that DMW deals with other aspects of media aside from games, and gaming has becoming a more popular form of media. Is there anything that you can attribute to this?

I think that the interactivity that games allow and the self-expression that they allow are two things that really allowed games to become more popular. It seems to me that the more static forms of entertainment are the ones that are struggling, and more and more consumers are demanding that their entertainment provide them the opportunity to give feedback and to be more involved than to just be sitting in front of a television set and watching things being reported to….they want to be a part of the experience. Games really do provide more of an “experiential” experience than any other form of entertainment, and I think that’s more and more what consumers are demanding today.

Is there anything you’d like to wrap up with?

I’d say that this is our first year going back to New York after a couple of years of having been out in the West Coast for our games events, and we’re extremely pleased with the response…the game industry is extremely strong on both coasts, and we’re really happy to see that and to see that support that we’re getting from the New York community in putting on this event.