Won't Someone Think of the Gamers?
They have money, devotion, and a growing list of grievances. That's an opportunity for the right comms team.
Programming note: I took a little bit of a summer break the last few weeks that was anything but a break. Alongside my client work, there’s a big project launching soon here on Person Familiar that has swallowed a bunch of my time. But we’re back in the saddle now and can’t wait for you to soon see what I’ve been cooking up.
This month, Electronic Arts briefly turned my favorite video game into a toll booth.
I love college football, and I loved the video game long before it was cool to admit it. When EA brought back its college football franchise two summers ago after a decade of absence, I enthusiastically pre-ordered.1 I did the same with the next season’s edition. So when College Football 27 launched July 9, my purchase was a foregone conclusion.
Then everyone found out EA had quietly pulled the free sliders that let you control how fast your players develop, then added a way to buy that development back. Maxing out one coach could run about $100, in a game that costs $70.
The revolt was immediate… and actually worked. Under #CFBPlayDontPay, players buried EA in enough noise that it pulled the paid progression within 48 hours. Then read the statement closely. EA never disowned the idea, just that it “missed the mark,” and promised more transparency next time. They also pointed to “live service plans in CFB28 and beyond.”2 Translation: get your wallets ready for next year, suckers.
This isn’t an isolated phenomenon in gaming right now, and it’s not exclusive to the software side. From getting nickel-and-dimed every time they fire up a game to seeing console prices go atmospheric, a huge, loyal, cash-rich audience is getting poked in the eye on a weekly basis.
Screwed two ways at once
Here’s a primer on the situation in case you aren’t a gamer or gamer-ally.
The memory in your PC and the high-bandwidth memory that feeds AI data centers roll off the same fabs. One gigabyte of the AI stuff eats about three gigabytes’ worth of manufacturing capacity of the normal stuff, at five to 10 times the margin. So Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are doing the rational thing: feed NVIDIA.
Try to build a gaming PC right now and you walk straight into the teeth of this resulting RAMpocalypse. A 32GB kit of DDR5 memory that cost around $100 last October now runs $375 to $440. PC memory contract prices jumped more than 100% in a single quarter. Just on the movement of memory and storage prices alone, it’s about 30 to 50 percent more expensive to build a gaming rig now than it was before.
Consoles went the wrong way too, which never ever happens. Five years into a generation, hardware is supposed to get cheaper. Instead the PS5 has climbed from $499 to $649.99, the Xbox Series X from $499 to $649.99 (with another jump to $799.99 landing in August), and the Switch 2 is set to go from $449.99 to $499.99 in September.
Valve shipped its Steam Machine in late June, a cute cube of a console priced at $1,049. Reviewers figure it would have cost around $750 without the memory crisis. It even ships with a single stick of RAM instead of a pair, because the dual-channel setup Valve wanted was the one configuration it couldn’t reliably buy.
Now the software. The games keep inventing new ways to charge you, per the EA saga above. Game Pass hiked its top tier 50% to $30 a month last October, bled “millions of subscribers,” and quietly walked the price back by spring.
The realist read here is that gamers are merely getting the bum end of a deal affecting many markets, this is all discretionary spending anyway, and gamers don’t really have any choice but to keep forking over cash.
And yes, they will pay anyway. But they don’t forgive. And sometimes, like with CFB 27, they win.
Gamers are everywhere
This is a big audience. About 3.6 billion people play games. The crowd organizing these revolts is smaller, obviously, but it reaches much further than the label “gamer” suggests. The average player is 36, smack dab in the middle of the coveted 18-49 demo. Only about 42% of people who play games call themselves “gamers” (that’s Activision Blizzard’s own ad-sales research, so grade on a curve, but the direction is right). The audience is so mainstream it doesn’t recognize itself as a niche.
Your customers are gamers, whether you or your marketing team thinks of them that way or not. Are you useful to them in the part of their life where they feel the most passion and, lately, the most abuse?
Throw them a metaphorical bone.3
Put yourself in a brand’s shoes. In a calm market, your first move barely registers. This is not a calm market. Gamers are paying close attention and feeling intensely, which makes anger an amplifier. It lands a real gesture harder than it would in normal times, and it lands a fake one like a brick.
The trap is treating gaming as a costume. You don’t want to be the brand doing the Steve Buscemi “how do you do, fellow kids” bit. Slapping a controller on your logo and calling it an activation is the fastest way to get dismantled by the exact people you want to court.
DoorDash, for example, understood the overlap between their customer base and gaming, and also recognized early that credibility would take time. It’s been showing up in gaming since 2021, partnered with FaZe Clan, built worlds inside Fortnite, and never overplayed its hand. By its own account, gamers are now its fastest-growing and most frequent customers.
DoorDash earned its standing the slow way, treating gamers as a relationship it wanted to keep. You can’t fake that at the moment you want it.
How to court gamers without getting burned
Which raises the fair objection: fine, but everybody starts somewhere, and I’m starting now, in the middle of all this. What can I actually do? Three pointers:
Lead with an act, not an announcement. Nobody needs another company saying it stands with gamers. Do one small, useful thing and let them notice. That kind of quiet utility beats a stadium of virtual banner ads because it solves a real problem in the actual moment of play.
Enter through the door you already own. You don’t need borrowed gaming credibility if you show up through the honest thing your product does while people play. A delivery app meets the 2 a.m. session. Latency already decides matches, so a phone carrier is halfway in the door before it says a word. A challenger fintech bank, whose whole pitch is killing junk fees, is speaking the exact language of an audience furious about being nickel-and-dimed. That real connection is your standing on day one.
Match your volume to your tenure. The newcomer showing up with a Super Bowl budget and a “gamers, we hear you” spot has it exactly backward. Start small. Partner with people the community already trusts and let them lead, the way McDonald’s UK did with Fnatic or Renault did by paying modders to build its cars into games.
One test sits under all three: only align yourself with the grievance if it’s actually yours. Would that hypothetical challenger fintech bank hate pay-to-skip mechanics even if gaming weren’t having a moment? Yes, because it’s the same fight it already picks with overdraft fees. If the answer is no, though, you’re Buscemi-ing.
Why it died and came back is a saga of amateurism, likeness rights, and a decade of lawyers. That’s another newsletter.
We here at Person Familiar offer our condolences to the EA comms person who had to ship this statement. Unless they also wrote it, in which case, good lord.
Or, more appropriately, a Mountain Dew Code Red.