Consumption and video games" research day
1st thematic research day
November 07, 2025 in Valenciennes
The video game industry today represents the most dynamic and important cultural industry in terms of sales, with 184 billion dollars (169.3 billion euros) and millions of players (allcorrectgames.com, 2024).
While the industry is currently going through a more difficult period (layoffs in many studios, recent stagnation in sales), its success is now global - among the top 10 markets in terms of number of players are 6 so-called developing countries, and a billion players live in China or India - and now game franchises are as often sources of films and series (Fallout), as films serve as platforms for games.
With the growing use of smartphones, video games have become social gaming (49% of the market by value in 2023). Video games can be seen as gatekeepers to activities in the making, and in particular the development of metavers and activities centered on virtual or quasi-virtual worlds (AR, VR).
Far from alarmist clichés, video games foster social relationships between players and non-players (Berry et al., 2022). Their development (penetration) among the public, young and old, makes them an instrument of socialization that's hard to ignore.
And video games infuse the world of entertainment.
And video games are infusing the corporate world with their collaborative and managerial approaches, with the strong development of gamification approaches, which are very much in evidence in academic research.
Yet, unlike psychology and psychology, video games are not a new phenomenon.
However, unlike psychology and sociology, marketing literature has invested relatively little in this area of research. Nevertheless, the factors that explain video game consumption have been explored, though not necessarily extensively (e.g. Cianfrone & Zhang, 2009). The typologies of gamers have been little renewed since the early 2000s.
The sustained appeal of video games and the inexorable diversification of their audience underlies the seminal question of the causes of their appeal. Initially, the literature focused on proximal motivations and causes (in the sense of Tinbergen, 1952) More recently, work based on evolutionary psychology (Breuer et al., 2019) has proposed "ultimate" levers. These works all seek to explain why violent games appeal to so many male and female gamers, why video game playing does not decline in adulthood, or why men and women generally prefer different games.
In marketing, there is a predominance of work and research that positions video games as tools, supports, strategies and marketing actions for other products and services: it focuses on their effects for the benefit of marketing and consumption processes. Traditionally, the literature distinguishes between actions carried out around games and actions carried out in games (around game vs. in game), but always to the benefit of other consumer objects. Particular attention is paid to the effects on awareness of promoted products and brands, memorization of actions, the resulting attitude towards brand or product, purchase intentions, induced brand image and congruence. The hedonic dimension has thus emerged as a logical structuring factor (e.g. Caroux and Pujol, 2024). Marketing research more rarely addresses consumer-centric themes (e.g. Tiercelin and Rémy, 2019; ). The emergence over the past fifteen years of MMORPGs and GAFAM's drive to deploy metavers, often based on or organized around the virtual worlds of video games, have led to the latter being placed at the heart of marketing strategy: both ubiquitous and ultimate media and central consumption objects, particularly in the perspective delimited by the customer experience (Trabelsi-Zoghlami et al., 2022).
Today, video games and the virtual worlds of today and tomorrow appear as a central element, a pivot, in marketing strategies and approaches, whether digital or physical. The offer combines products (consoles), services and experiences. Uses are centered on smartphones. Geographically, the market, dominated by the new powers, reflects the ongoing shift in mass consumer markets towards the South, and Asian markets in particular. Video games are driving the development of related approaches: spectator streaming via social networks, e-sports, etc. At the same time, video games, like all cultural products, involve a trade-off between pleasure and the consumption of resources, notably energy, in an increasingly constrained environment.
However, this framework of analysis no longer fully corresponds to the actions that are being developed today: how do we analyze actions involving the complete packaging of a game over a given period (advergame or product placement)? how do we qualify virtual reality games? what type of action corresponds to in-game skins? in-game fashion shows? or in-game virtual stores? what about phygital actions (actions around augmented reality on the model of Pokémon Go)?
