Utsav

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A recent report by Accenture stated that according to their studies, the gaming industry is valued at $300 Billion, and it will keep getting bigger. The study even went ahead and described gaming as the next ’Super-Platform’.

This makes the gaming industry attractive to firms looking to enter it. One such case was Google’s bet on a possible disruption in the form of Google launching ‘Stadia’. Stadia is a cloud based video gaming platform in which a customer needs no hardware in particular. Only an input device like a handheld controller is needed. The game is played on their existing devices, without any hardware/graphic limitations. This is done by doing all the graphic computations at google’s end, and then streaming those back to the users device.

This does away with the need of consumers having to invest in any gaming hardware be it a gaming PC or a console. This is disruptive as it brings down the floor price of Graphic intensive gaming through a subscription based pricing model. The specific model of disruption being unbundling, as it unbundles the gaming experience and a physical console/computing unit.

Google is not the only one to have ventured into this technology. Xbox and Nvidia launched their own version of it, called ‘Xbox Cloud Gaming’ and ‘GEForce Now’ , respectively.

However, like with any new technology, cloud gaming does have its own issues that it needs to overcome before it can witness wide scale adoption. One of these are the latency issues that refer to the mismatch/delay of timing between a user’s input and the server’s output based on that input. This can cause lags in the gaming experience. This issue can only be resolved by increasing the adoption of faster optic fibre based internet connections, making the success of Cloud Gaming dependent on it.

Reference- www.accenture.com. (April,2021). The new face of gaming. [online] Available at: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/software-platforms/gaming-the-next-super-platform.

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*The Nyan Cat, an instantly recognisable meme from the early 2010s*

Information goods are commodities that deliver utility to the consumer by providing them with consumable content, more often digitally than not.

A meme is any internet trend that has the basic structure of a reference to another piece of information, along with a personal take/twist added in by the creator. I believe that memes have become a big enough part of popular culture to be considered information goods.

The presence of the following aspects of informational goods in memes might help in delivering my point;

Indestructibility– Memes are digital ‘art works’. they have no physical form like traditional manufactured goods, and are intangible. Hence this property applies, as one cannot really physically destroy a meme.
Transmutability– Memes are extremely customisable and modifiable as they can be layered. They also follow a basic template format which further encourages personalisation. The more a personalised meme resonated with people, the wider an audience it reaches. There are several sub categories/divisions on meme hosting platforms like Reddit and 9Gag in order to cater to this transmutability. This also means that the inherit the flaw of loss of control over integrity of the original creator. Memes can be easily transformed from their original form, making it difficult for the original poster to control the integrity.
Reproducibility– Unlike a software or other informational goods, the initial cost of making a meme is not usually high. It is almost negligible. However this property still applies as creating copies of that meme and reproducing it for distribution are virtually nil.

For memes to be considered Informational ‘Goods’, there needs to be some monetary value attached to their utility.

This is increasingly happening at a wider scale, now more than ever.

Memes, just like other forms of content, are being rapidly monetised with the help of platform hosts like Youtube, TikTok, Instagram etc. These platforms reward creators of these memes directly with financial incentives.

Another monetary value of memes is in their use as a marketing tool by corporations and political organisations et al, for promotional purposes. The use of memes has been known to have increase consumers’ interaction by 2-10 times (Forbes,2018), These organisations hire dedicated social media handlers to help them come up with on trend memes to make their promotions more relatable to the younger generation.

In conclusion, memes are a diverse format of content consumption which can be a source of entertainment, news and other information. They have some monetary value attached to them and possess the properties of information goods, This makes them, in my opinion at least, valid Informational Goods.

Reference- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2018/08/10/memes-a-digital-marketing-tool-for-every-industry/?sh=145d02872664

Cloud Game Streaming-The Future Of Gaming?

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Memes Have Become Informational Goods

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