What the media industry could learn from games

The following is a guest post from Matthias Sala, the founder of the mixed-reality game studio Gbanga, having worked on activity-based advertising at Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, smart vacuum cleaners at the ETH Zurich and self-refilling refrigerators at Siemens Smart Home Lab in Munich. He won the Sentient Future Award for Bin It!, a futuristic waste disposal system with a gamification component.  In the last decade, the video games industry has reinvented itself. Adapting to the presence of free culture and piracy in digital distribution, the industry has responded by publishing free-to-play games with novel business models. If you have a look at the Top Grossing apps in the App Stores and Markets, you will find that the majority of the top titles are free-to-play games. In opposition to this trend, few news apps are present among these top grossing rankings and, excluding the New York Times, most newspapers do not report on exciting revenues from digital media. At the same time, newspapers and publishers have fallen into a severe crisis despite existing lucrative business models and concepts for digital contentâ€"just look at the games in the App Stores! In the highly competitive market of games, everything is free. However, our players appreciate our games so much that they are happy to pay between 99 cents and 99 dollars for virtual goods that have no physical value per se. At the same time, newspapers with high quality articles are struggling to persuade readers to pay f