Gaming Trends on Twitter

uh we go to another massive sort of titan uh of the social game space uh in the form of twitter uh next up and we're going to have uh ramy uh brusilovsky i hope that's a good essence and stephen king probably not that one but a stephen king offering their uh overview of gaming trends on twitter so more more trends i'm sure more data coming up from them as well um so they'll be coming along in just a second there we are there they are in the same room hello hello ramy and stephen you've got your mic i need to unmute you hold on there we go can you hear me here we are there we are how are you are you i'm good i'm good where are you in the world we're in dublin at the

moment in dublin no okay that's not too far so less exotic you know we're we're we're closer to the queen close to the queen yeah well yeah we'll see how long that goes next up advancing be interesting okay and so we can have like lots of queen conversations but let's leave them for another conference fair enough okay we'll not get into the queen i i you know i'm tenuous my stay in the uk as is but anyway i'm going to let you guys are you guys ready to you you you're almost socially distant stairs i meet you apart you've got this yeah it's fine it's fine i've only been don't worry we are a we are in a big conference room with some windows open no you're in a bubble it's fine don't go stephen i feel like i pushed him out of the side there but anyway it's good okay i'm gonna hand this are you ready to go you ready to show us your data uh yes yes i'm ready okay i'm gonna i'll be in the background any issues and we'll come back some questions at the end so i should all right all right leave it to you okay thank you my screen

all right so uh hello again so we are a ramy brucilovsky and stephen king a client partners at twitter and today we're going to be talking about two of our favorite subjects a gaming and twitter and how these two uh intertwine we are going to first of all these are our actual uh twitter handles feel free to dm ask for anything any questions that might raise after the presentation uh so the agenda today and we are going to start with the general update on our platform uh discussing uh about a few new interesting tools that we have released and from there we are going to be moving so to some gaming specific statistics about the gaming conversation on twitter and the gamers

and how they relate to this conversation uh and from there we'll open to some questions if we have some time left after i wasted a few minutes with our tech issues okay so and let's get going twitter is what's happening in the world and where people are talking about right now uh this is a sentence that we use a lot and and it has never been more true than it is right now uh people from across the globe are turning to twitter like they never did before and we can see a a 34 increase in monetizable down a year over year in the both international and u.s growth which is a quite impressive numbers uh and this actually this growth has been supported uh

by a lot of a technical and product improvements that we have made including some cool features like a topics topics allow people to follow a certain topic of their interest without following specific handles uh what allows and and and bolsters the general discovery mindset that people come to twitter with a we've grown the number of topics that people can follow to around the 4 000 at the moment and this includes of course a gaming a health information sports music and local news and there has been great adoption to this feature with more than 50 million people following topics nowaday this next slide is showing

a another amazing new feature that we have that is called conversation controls here we can see nasa literally from space having a conversation a private conversation in plain sight by using a conversation controls and allowing only people that are mentioned on the tweet to reply this basically allow a brands and anyone on twitter to be creative about the way they open a conversation in public and who they allow it to not only be an expectator by but to only but also to become a part of this conversation uh and i as i was mentioning earlier we've seen a growth in monetizable users uh to around 186 million and when we put this together with a twitter audience platform that

gives a reach of 800 million users through a twitter a ad platform and the enrich is obviously a very very important factor for all means and purposes when we are talking about sharing the voice of your brand sharing the voice of your game sharing your own voice but where our users really really shine is in their behavior they are the real early adopters they are always the first one to try and to buy new products they're actually 60 more likely to be the first to try a new thing and 53 more likely to be the first to buy a new product this is something that we know also because we've done of course a lots of research on our own audience but this is

evident because people on twitter talk about things that interest in them and things that actually are are new and cutting edge and so this conversation is wide open in the platform for everyone to see and now i'm moving forward to to the main course to to gaming on twitter uh twitter loves gaming and gaming loves twitter no matter how you look at the numbers uh most twitter users are gamers sixty percent of our users describe themselves as gamers and 53 percent of gamers are more likely to be on twitter than the general population this gives a a very very deep meaning to to the platform uh it means of a gaming culture and

everything that has to do with a gaming games being launched achievements being unlocked uh esports and any type of gaming conversation you can think of is happening on the platform and users in the platform use a very very wide variety of a gaming genre going from shooters and battle royale racing and simulation games of course mmos and then a card games and we can see it through very very different research that we've done in this case showing a console plus pc mean of the of the user of interest by genre and these users aren't shy to talk about a their gaming behavior their likes and dislikes we can see here that the throughout the years the gaming

conversation has been increasing exponentially on the platform these are numbers that are very very impressive and keep going in as we move forward to the year 2020 and are bolstered by covid19 where we can see in march a peak of a 13 million tweets versus a a bit less than 10 million the year before we can see that the conversation keeps growing and growing and the this is uh something that's very very interesting about this is that this growth it wasn't only the same people uh talking and more it was also 22 of unique authors that were joining the conversation meaning that more people came to the platform to talk about gaming to talk about games and we can see that the gaming

conversation kept rising and again bolstered by this new reality reaching a staggering 45 year-over-year growth in june this year a one of the drivers of of this growth that goes beyond geopolitics and and and worldwide health was a animal crossing and i'm myself i'm a nintendo switch owner and i was a and it was amazing like this game came from of course people knew about animal crossing but the but the launch generated an astounding 16.7 million tweets on the 12th first day in the global launch and there was to the point where there was like even a subculture around animal crossing generated on twitter we can see some very very interesting examples of

people that were talking about the game for example in this tweet that we are seeing here actress brie larson that plays a captain marvel talking about how she pays more attention to her wardrobe on the pla on the game than she does in real life we can see here another cool example where we see that this twitter tells a story about how elijah would uh dropped into her a virtual world in animal crossing to sell her some turnips and this is of course an example you know how the platform can bring together is a celebrity with the with an average joe and generate a magical moment uh but the most important thing to to take into consideration is that people talk about gaming and they talk about

gaming from the perspective of their need states people come to gaming because they are looking for for satisfaction of of certain needs that they feel and and in this research that we did a couple of years ago you can see that the for four main needs states are achieving thrill-seeking unwinding and excitement but in a newer study that we did the post-covit 19 outbreak we can see three new neat states that come and take the the lead being socializing normalizing and idling socializing people are looking of new ways to stay connected with their friends and families here minecraft mind replace facebook they are looking at the thing at

normalizing actually looking some kind of normals in their daily routine again here animal crossing and and simulation games giving you an opportunity to virtually live a a real life have a have a cup of coffee meet with friends have a conversation and idling a passing time lots of free time a new free time that we cannot probably do our regular hobbies on and people here go to battle royale games again to simulation and to and and to many other genres of gaming like final fantasy here being mentioned as well and now in order to drill down into some more gaming specific statistics i'm going to pass the propeller mic to to stephen king and by the way that's true he's not the writer and and i've been told that only the the the younger people don't even ask

that anymore so i felt a little bit old when i asked him myself yeah thank you stephen cheers rami good morning everyone as robbie mentioned earlier in the presentation my name is stephen king and i'm a client partner in twitter working with some of the world's biggest mobile and console gaming publishers and it's an absolute pleasure to be speaking with you all this morning so far we've discussed the current status of twitter which rami has mentioned has been growing exponentially and offering real value to users and advertisers alike rami also discussed the power of gaming on our platform and just how big and engaged in an audience we are and we all know how engaged that audience is one thing that really stood out to me was the role of gaming during covet 19 and its impact on society and well-being and very few industries can have such an impact and it's an absolute privilege to be working in it following on from these points i will now discuss two key topics with you the first being gamers on twitter and

their behaviors and the second being outlining the different types of gamers on twitter let's look at gamers and their behaviors so firstly just to note for the purpose of our presentation i will be discussing and in some cases i'll be discussing market specific data just in case you're wondering when we look into the the demographics of gaming on twitter in the uk you can see that our demographic our gender split is 66 male and 34 female over 82 percent of our audience is between the ages of 16 and 44 and they predominantly live in urban and suburban areas one thing that we say about our audience is that they're extremely passionate about our platform and gamers are that over 55 of gamers use twitter on a daily basis and when we talk about reach [Music] romney discussed earlier around the huge growth of mdaeu's uh and especially in q2

20 of this year where we grew over 34 percent year in year reach is a very important factor for advertisers looking to reach a gaming audience and twitter offers this to summarize this twitter offers over 12x this the reach of gamers on mobile and twitch and over twice as many gamers than on mobile than reddit so we have a really really big and powerful audience and what what makes this even more impactful is it makes it easier for brands like yourselves to engage with this audience when you're bringing updates and news to the market when we look at the different types of devices that gamers are using we can drill down into the usage types and over 85 of our audience use mobile as a primary gaming device which is very aligned with twitter usage

when we drill into it the other different devices we see that pc and console are obviously a large percentage but one thing that was really interesting is the growth of streaming which is obviously a very in its infancy and something that romney touched on earlier was that twitter users are early adopters and they're technologically advanced and nothing speaks to this point any more than that fact to further emphasize that we did some research around will twitter users switch to playing stream rather than gaming systems and over 25 percent of respondents that they're likely to do so again re-emphasizing the fact that our users are thought leaders influential and early adopters of technology one thing that we're really proud of is our audience and their interests and how passionate they are about their hobbies and interests and they're very leaned in and gamers are no different over 53 percent of twitter gamers

play more than six hours a week and we all know people having jobs families and other interests that's a lot of time to devote to a passion when we look at the way they engage and how they play they predominantly play by themselves which would make sense with mobile being one of the primary devices and people using this on their community to work on on breaks and downtime but interestingly they thirty five percent of them play both online and loan and something we're going to discuss later on is the growth of community the power of our platform to connect people like-minded people and how that is netted out in a growth in online gaming one thing that we've discussed and ramy mentioned earlier in the presentation was the growth in our audience the offer the value this offers to advertisers and our audience are an extremely valuable bunch and i'm now going to take you through a couple of insights that will prove

this so the majority of twitter gamers will buy more than two games a year and over 42 would between buy between two and five games per year when we look at it from a mobile perspective which is obviously really important for a lot of our attendees this morning our audience are twice as likely to be big spenders on mobile games rather than non-users and over 2.1 times as likely to be big expenditures on pc games rather than non-users when we drill down that even further our audience are 76 percent more likely to buy time savers on dlcs and we all know how important dlcs in-app purchases and how they're shaping the future of both the console and mobile gaming industries so now we're going to dig into the different gamers on twitter and what they're motivated by and ultimately like why are they coming to twitter and we did a piece of research called flocks and essentially what fox did was it identified all of the key topics that

are driving conversation in our platform so it looked into the likes of sports tv film music gaming and what i did was it did a more in-depth analysis into what's actually shaping these conversations what's driving them and there were kind of two key motivations that we talked from this research the first was discovery and social proofing which is essentially people come to twitter to stay up to date with news to find out information and from your brands around updates game launches dlcs betas etc but also to create new networks which would make sense twitter with twitter but what we didn't realize was that people are coming to twitter they're discussing these you know smaller ips or more niche topics and they're connecting with like-minded individuals who share a similar opinion or a very different opinion and they value their opinion and twitter as a platform is a great way

for bringing people together who who can discuss these topics and when they come to the platform and again just re-emphasizing the fact that our audience twitter's audience is its superpower they're a very engaged bunch but what's different about our audience versus other platforms is the mindset in which they come to our platform in and they come in this discovery mindset what that means is that they're open and receptive to new messages and new things and they're actively coming to the platform to seek new information what does this mean they want to come to the platform to keep up with gaming news they don't want to talk with gaming brands and a lot of you will have community managers who will be engaging with these on a daily basis they read about gaming personalities and they rant vent uh and share jokes and i actually read i was made aware of a really funny tweet a couple of weeks back where it was uh

this person left their airpods on their desk at work and uh they got up off the desk to walk to go for a walk and the colleagues could hear the person playing candy crush chew their airpods on their desk and this was a conversation that took place on twitter and it had over 20 thousand likes and huge engagement but again just showing the more lighthearted nature of twitter and its correlation with gaming other trends we've seen develop on the platform are fandom so we've spoken about that audience connecting together and then they create this kind of bigger thing out of what was small because obviously two is greater than one and essentially what they can do is they can hero these smaller ips they create communities and and and they interconnect with these people creative currency is another thing we've seen as a trend and basically people are getting more creative in the platform they're putting it out in the platform and getting feedback on the platform

and and finally it's connection through video video is a key drive for our business and and it's it's helping shape online tournaments and and online connection so before i'm going to delve into the gaming population i just wanted to kind of summarize what we've discussed so far so we've discussed that we have a huge audience that are extremely leaned in they're active gamers across all of the different devices whether that be mobile to to online uh our streaming and they are tech or early adopters of technology and extremely valuable whether that be on hardware dlcs in-app purchases consoles they're an extremely extremely valuable bunch so i'm now going to take you through our gaming population and how it's distributed across different genres as you can see it's quite evenly mixed

between casual straight up to hardcore and when we drill into the u.s market as an example we can see that 61 of twitter users are either hardcore or moderate and again re-emphasizing the point about our audience and the quality of our audience twitter reaches over 70 percent of all us gamers that game more than 20 hours a week this audience is the most powerful the most valuable and there are global trendsetters from a gaming perspective and we have them and they're synonymous of what a twitter user is influential viable and passionate when we look at the breakdown by device and genre we can see that mobile gamers are traditionally casual

casual gamers use mobiles 55 of their private 55 of the gamers who use it as their primary device but quite interesting with pc it's quite an even mix between casual straight up to hardcore so two key topics before i summarize um what we've discussed today is you know why twitter for gaming and if you're to remember to do things from today please note these number one twitter is the best platform for spreading news interaction interacting with gaming brands and secondly it's a place to connect and share views with like-minded individuals create fandom meet people meet colleagues uh share opinions and challenge opinions with like-minded individuals and and that's a superpower of our platform and it brings the gaming the global gaming conversation together

so unconscious that we're running out of time um so just to summarize what we've discussed today so twitter is what's happening in the world and what people are talking about right now twitter has never been more relevant than today that's uh true to the fact that our platform has been growing exponentially over 34 percent mda used in q2 2020 but we're also backing that up by offering real value to advertisers and customers we have an audience that are extremely engaged and leaned in and when we drill down into the gaming audience gaming is one of our fastest growing communities and we we've seen the impact of the gaming audience our platform and and it's impacting cover 19 and it's and how it's helped develop people's uh well-being and and help with their mental state and when we drill into the gamers

themselves they're extremely passionate it's a large audience as we can see they're extremely valuable and they're willing to take action whether that be to adopt new tech or new games or new ways of doing things and in summary twitter gaming or twitter loves gamers and gaming loves twitter thank you very much thank you very much that was a good uh a good double act lots and lots and lots and lots of data there um i think you want to take your screen off there off your screenshot i don't know if i can force you to do that there we go look at you got your lovely faces now uh that's great we don't have loads time for questions so we're okay a couple but people can email and get in contact with the twitter guys uh later you might be able to tweet them apparently there's this new platform they've got you can contact them that way so um yeah i just wanted to decide when

to say this there's there's some some huge growth in the numbers there like incredible growth in in in numbers of it's hardly surprising that would be great but that was staggering how's the kind of nature of conversation changed a bit or what people are talking about um are they behaving differently during the lockdown have you seen different trends emerging or anything from a gamer perspective so when when looking at the data all of this conversation about the the need states that the drive gaming is it's something that that you can see it out there all of all of these studies they also are sometimes driven you know but by polls and things like that but also if you look at the at the nature of the conversation you can see all of these new neat states that we were talking about about idling about socializing becoming a very very evident in the conversation itself you know whereas more people would be

you know like we were saying like bragging about high scores and uh and and talking about you know the frustrations that they might have felt in a certain level of a game or things like that you can see the conversation skewing towards you know i feel i feel like i'm a normal person when i'm gaming i'm meeting my friends for for a coffee in in my you know in my sim town or my minecraft a world or or my island in in this other game you know that's kind of becoming evident in the conversation itself it's very interesting actually yeah i mean there's loads of i've got i mean like there's some incredible data there is is there is there a way for our uh developers or our uh or our viewers to get access to some of that is is that just reports you put house uh how can they how can they get that because that seems really fascinating you know you've got a massive audience it's really good to see what people care about it's all games they care about whether they're changing is there are there ways that people can get access to

that we we would host um quite regular webinars or we have been and obviously speaking at events like this is a great way for us to bring this to market also um if you get in touch with your account team at twitter and we'll be more than happy to facilitate that and but it's definitely something you know at twitter we have a wealth of data and some really you know really interesting insights for a lot of publishers and uh and you know it's definitely something you know reach out to your account team but we're looking we'll be we'll you'll definitely see a lot more of our data um we've been hosting a lot of events drilling down our audience as well yeah twitter is an open platform and and again from coming from us assuming you're are a client you will have an account team if not the platform is open and you can as a small user you know search uh again explore topics kind of go the way of the of the ui the platform is

basically made to empower this discovery of content and of insights and then of course we have it the platform is open and has an api an api partnership program with everyone that wants to become a power user has a way of of technologically integrating into the data fantastic okay um there are a couple of questions but i think we're going to have to the interest of time push on so people will be able to find you uh in in the meeting system or in discord or on twitter obviously uh and i'm a myself so uh maybe we can we can we can chat there i tend to follow us on twitter follow us on twitter search us in any other social network i'm not going to to plug any other social networks social the social networks are available that's what you have we are not deep fakes we really look like this so look around for us cool thank you so much for your time guys that was really fascinating i'm really thanks for being generous and sharing the data have a have a great couple of days very much thank you so

much digital dish around the pores there for that fantastic you