What do you do if you want to revolutionize the gaming industry through collaboration with other industries?

In my experience as a gaming entrepreneur, revolutionizing the industry through collaboration with other sectors is a powerful strategy. Collaborating allows us to merge expertise and technologies from diverse fields, leading to more engaging and immersive games. For instance, teaming up with the education industry can result in fun and educational games, while partnering with health experts can lead to wellness and fitness-focused gaming experiences. Moreover, collaboration opens doors to new audiences, markets, and platforms, as we adapt our games to meet the needs of various sectors and consumers.

To revolutionize the gaming industry through collaboration with other industries, it's essential to foster interdisciplinary partnerships that leverage the strengths of each sector involved. One strategy could involve collaborating with experts from fields such as neuroscience, psychology, and education to create games that not only entertain but also contribute to personal development, mental well-being, or learning outcomes.

Determine which industries you believe could complement or benefit from collaboration. Look for companies or organizations that have products that could be integrated into gaming and benefit from it. There can be various opportunities to collaborate like immersive storytelling, gamified learning experiences, or interactive simulations. Focus on delivering value to gamers while tapping into the expertise of your collaborators.

Collaborating in the gaming industry requires clear communication and mutual respect. When working with diverse backgrounds and disciplines, it's essential to have a shared vision and goal. Effective communication, feedback sharing, and conflict resolution are key.

First of all define a goal for the collaboration. What do you want to achieve is key to start with your plan: 1. Increase the number of downloads. 2. Engage your existing players. 3. Get more expossure. Once you have clear your goal, make sure you prepare a deck of your studio and your game highlighting the key metrics that can matter the most to other industry. For example: 1. Number of Impressions. 2. Number of players. 3. Key markets and demographics. Use them to present them to different industries, show them how they can collaborate with you in creative ways as a new marketing channel.

Communication, negotiation and alignment are some of the methods in this aspect. Knowing what each of the stakeholder need and from there, strike a balance in the conversation to suggest inputs to align interest of the people involved. Only when the consensus is met and agreement is reached are you able to kickstart the collaboration execution. Be sure everyone is aware of the happenings in every phases while maintaining the communication channel open, flag out anything that may be a warning sign and discuss to approach it tactfully. Remember that collaboration is a skill that requires trust, and it is built on top of communication and teamwork.

It depends on what you want to achieve with the collaboration. If you want to get more visibility of your game but not create a deep-experience in your gameplay, you can collaborate on marketing campaigns. If you want to give a new experience for your players and keep up on live-ops, you can collaborate on limited time event collaborations. If you want to just build a new game around an IP that has a huge fanbase you can work on a standalone game as a studio with the licensor. If you want to get out of the "digital" zone and go for something "physical" you can collaborate with brands to create merch from your game or get your game promoted on different stores. There are endless of posibilities but each one has a different purpose.

In my experience, collaborating across industries in game development offers endless possibilities. We can team up on various aspects like design, art, sound, story, mechanics, and marketing. This collaboration can lead to creating new genres, themes, and formats of games, or enhancing existing ones with fresh features and modes. Additionally, integrating cutting-edge technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and blockchain opens doors to innovative gaming experiences.

From my own journey, I've found a wide array of potential collaborators in the gaming industry. Depending on your goals and resources, you can partner with fellow game developers, publishers, platforms, and distributors. Beyond gaming, there are exciting opportunities for collaboration with industries like education, health, entertainment, media, tourism, sports, and fashion. Additionally, academic institutions, research centers, non-governmental organizations, and communities offer valuable knowledge, data, funding, and feedback for collaborative projects.

The gaming industry has seen remarkable collaborations, like Riot Games teaming up with Louis Vuitton and Kojima Productions partnering with Acronym. These collaborations resulted in unique products, such as a branded travel case for the "League of Legends" tournament trophy and high-fashion clothing for the game "Death Stranding." These partnerships show how gaming and other industries can come together to create something special, expanding the reach of both worlds.

"Gamification" is the term I've learned, which involves adding game components such as rewards, levels, animations, leaderboards, etc., to your applications to potentially increase engagement worldwide. Collaboration with other fields through Gamification is what the world is waiting for!

Collaboration or crossover appeal as I call it is the future of gaming. Gaming is a central and steady constant to so many peoples lives, a way to engage with friends and a way that many pick to escape reality. Its somewhere that 'other industries' can directly engage with 'audiences'. My automated esports tournament platform hosted tournaments for a billion dollar fashion brand and this will become the norm soon!