Lucero further highlights Samsung’s data-driven approach to product development, using extensive user research including biometric studies and UXR testing. He also discusses current gaming trends like cloud streaming, the convergence of gaming and entertainment media, and how AI is being used to enhance game development.
Taking a Holistic Approach to Gaming
All Things Insights: We have the pleasure of being with Mike Lucero, Global Head of Product Management for Gaming at Samsung Electronics America. Thanks for coming on and talking to us today about gaming, insights and market research.
The theme of the Media Insights & Engagement Conference is all about the connected viewer, and that’s a key trend across the media and entertainment space, including gaming. We were curious about how Samsung caters to this connected viewer, the connected gamer, and how it creates a seamless and immersive gaming experience?
Mike Lucero: Sure. We built from the ground up to support that scenario and that use case. And that’s part of why I came to Samsung quite a few years ago to build our gaming offerings.
For one thing, we have the hardware, the software, and the services all integrated in several places. We’ve got it in the gaming hub. We have it also in our media home where we have more casual experiences. Since we bring that all together in a unified manner, we can bring both. That benefits both the media side and the gaming side. And we’ve thought about it holistically. I come from the video game world. I was at Xbox and Twitch, so I certainly know what’s important for gamers, which is for core gamers it’s the performance and great visual experiences and latency. For more casual gamers, it’s more about accessibility.
But in all cases, we bring the hardware, the software and the service together, that really allows us to remove the friction and make things more accessible. Fundamentally, we are positioned to lean into the future, and that’s why we’ve been leaders in this.
We were the first to bring an experience like the gaming hub to smart TVs in a way that was more sort of console like, if you will. We’re also leading the charge when it comes to getting more accessible casual experiences to gamers as well. We have a number of many different initiatives on TV, and we have many different audiences and constituencies to serve. We have drawn a lot of insights on each and every one of those segments, and that defines our content offering and the content types that we provide. I know there’s a lot there to unpack!
Focusing on a Frictionless User Experience
All Things Insights: It’s afascinating field that’s really rich for insights and market research, understanding the consumer and all these different gamers and consumers that you target. What other additional trends do you see right now in terms of gaming technology and the future for the gaming space?
Mike Lucero: The big trend I see right now that pertains particularly to our platform, which is if you look around the ecosystem, especially with some of the newer players like Netflix, the CTV or the smart TV is the next platform. There’s historically been Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, but we are the fourth platform for ten-foot experiences because the console is becoming obviated.
If you look particularly at Xbox, their investments are heavily into the cloud, really placing big bets on Game Pass and delivering different incarnations that speak to different audience segments. If you look at Netflix, they never were on a console, but they’re bringing stream gaming to the platform. There are certain games that don’t even require you to have any streaming. It’s really the fact that the game streaming is enabling and unlocking a whole new set of user experiences and game types. These continue to satisfy the core gamers.
For example, Fortnite continues to be very popular on our platform as do any of the new titles that come out. If you look at the top titles at any given time on Twitch, those will always be available on our smart TVs through either Game Pass or GeForce NOW or Boosteroid. But then again, on the more casual side, we have a bunch of other game types that are much more accessible to a broader set of users, which brings up another important trend in my opinion, which is friction.
At the end of the day, it’s the friction that is the most important thing that we manage and where we can really bring value to the consumer.
Removing the need for especially for the more casual players, the need for a subscription or a game controller, there’s been a lot of innovation there. We’ve been really building up our portfolio of offerings with our partners and also first party where we don’t require a Bluetooth controller. Only a small percentage, if you look at the entire universe of TVs out there, only a small percentage actually have game controllers, those that have consoles connected, maybe a few PC gamers. They are pretty dedicated to those devices, and they’re kind of reluctant to unpair them. We obviously have people pairing their Bluetooth controllers to our TVs, but it’s a big ask for them, a lot of friction.
So we brought games that either utilize a virtual mobile controller where you scan the QR code and you can play the game. Or we’ve built a trivia game called The Six, another one called Ripplash where all you need is a remote control and you can play the game. Some of our other partners, like Playworks, also have games that only require a remote control. Those are actually amongst the most successful on our platform. Netflix employs the same approach as does Luna in terms of having casual games that don’t require the Bluetooth controller and you scan the QR code and have a custom controller for that game that might just have three or five or six buttons just required for the game, not the 18 or 24 or whatever that a Bluetooth controller can have.
Some of those experiences will be ad funded as well, which also reduces that friction. In the case of the first-party games we’ve built, those are also free ad supported or just free. And in some cases, there’s a whole trend that we’re leaning into right now on our TV-plus service. We’re actually bringing the games into the TV experience.
We have a product we call Game Breaks where you’re watching a show, say, Project Runway. We’re actually running this as we speak. You’re watching Project Runway, and we’ve created some trivia questions that particularly pertain to that series to drive engagement. We’re finding that when there’s contextually relevant content in those game breaks basically, you’re watching Project Runway, a 45-second ad that’s sponsored, and then there’s a trivia question that pops up that in this case, to that content. And then you answer it, and then there’s a 15-second spot afterwards from a sponsor. We’re literally bringing the games to the users in that case. We found this all tremendously successful, and we’ve seen high engagement rates.
Recently, our TV-plus team sponsored the Jonas Brothers live concerts. We’ve had two events where we’ve allowed the fans to vote on which songs that are played within the show. Those engagement rates were upwards of 10%. We also ran one on New Year’s Eve where they voted for the New Year’s song. We’re seeing incredibly high engagement. What we’re finding is that users want to engage. They want to lean in.
The Players: Insights & Product Development
Mike Lucero: When we provide the right experience, and back to your question about insights, this is all data driven. I come from a world where insights, research and user studies are an incredibly important part of the product development process.
From the get-go, when I started at Samsung, we began in the focus group facility with a bunch of concepts, ran those by users, then we turn those into concepts that we then prototyped and ran. We have a UXR team that does UXR studies. We have a lab in Mountain View where we bring in dozens of gamers to get reactions, and we watch them with multiple cameras. We’ve actually done work with a company called MediaScience that captures biometric information as well. We really do believe in very deep qualitative research. We pair that with quantitative studies against our target users. That all goes into the product development process.
In the case of the game breaks, each of those went through a UXR study before we launch them. We want to make sure and we make little tweaks on those to make sure the games are fun and playable. And then once the product’s shipped, then, of course, we have a lot of telemetry where we actually analyze the data and see what’s working, what’s not working. In the case of game breaks, we started off with a lower interaction rate. We made some tweaks, made some modifications, and that’s what drove up the engagement rate to some pretty stellar numbers.
Leveraging AI
All Things Insights: You’ve brought up so many initiatives that Samsung is doing with gaming, smoothing out the user experience, developing content, engaging the user, and then bringing it all back to insights and research. Does AI play a role in helping with the insights in the market research as well now in terms of developing and gathering all of this data?
Mike Lucero: Well, we’ve recently made a bunch of announcements at CES, although it’s not my core competency. But we are really creating ways to use AI to enhance the user experience for TV watching overall. Clearly, we’re placing a big bet in terms of the user experience. But from my perspective and from a gaming perspective, there’s other applications of AI.
First of all, we actually use AI when we launched the gaming hub. We had AI upscaling in our TVs to improve the appearance of the visual of the stream for games. We basically use AI to improve the visual quality of the stream. We’ve actually employed AI since in terms of making sure that the user experience is as good as it can be. We certainly use AI to help us as tooling for game development. We don’t use it explicitly, but we use it as a tool to help us build things, to help us generate some of the content. It helps us move things along more quickly in terms of development.
We use it in all sorts of different ways. We’re being measured about it. At the end of the day, we are editorially driven. It doesn’t go out to market just sort of sight unseen. We use it as a tool to sort of winnow down what might turn into a user experience, but then, we have an editorial team that makes sure that what comes out actually is going to meet the quality bar that we need it to be.
Now that said, for example, we do have, in Luna, the Amazon service, there is a completely AI driven game with Snoop Dogg that is all AI. Our partners are certainly leaning into it, and we certainly support that because we feel like we’re still in the sort of infancy of how that’s going to be realized in our ecosystem. We absolutely are very excited when they do experiments like that and see how they perform because that will help us with our own programs. Our intention is never to develop a bunch of first party games, but we certainly will use games to help prove out experiential models and gaming models that we think are going to be successful.
The degree that we can use AI to sort of do some of that prototyping and some of that first-party development that actually is going to create a great experience that delights the user. We’re certainly looking at what our partners are doing and also trying to lean into that as well.
Developing a Transmedia Story Experience
All Things Insights: Let’s talk a little bit about the future of the gaming industry. Where do you see all of this convergence of gaming, entertainment, social media, content going into the future with the consumer?
Mike Lucero: Absolutely. And I kind of teed this up when I talked about the hardware, software and services. We’ve had some great examples, and I think it’s only going to get richer because our partners are certainly believing heavily in it. In December, we did a big announcement with a big event in LA, where we basically brought the Fallout franchise together, with a number of experiences. It speaks to the convergence that I would say exists today and is only going to exist more in the future because these are all very successful endeavors.
There was kind of a Fallout moment in December where, first of all, from a media side, obviously, the hero of the game and the hero of the experience is the Fallout gaming franchise. Clearly, that’s the heart and soul of that experience. But we also had the TV plus, which is our free ad supported TV service, we had season one available there for free to watch to get people excited for the next season of Fallout two on Prime Video. We showed it on TV plus in advance of the updated series. And Fallout 76 launched at the same time approximately. This is all in a one or two week window. And then subsequent to that, we actually showed at this event the first episode of the Fallout two series. That shows how it all brings it together. We actually broadcast during that event on Twitch.
We had to bring in some influencers who showed all this, and we got quite a few CCUs on Twitch as well. We brought that all together and that took a lot of work to make that happen. I think in the future, our goal is to make that more scalable, more seamless. We have tremendous appetite from our partners to do this.
They’re always wanting us to line up when these big franchises come out. We’ve actually done this before with Star Wars, with Indiana Jones, where we have a bunch of content in our TV-plus service, free ad supported movies, for example, or movies from our partners at Prime or Netflix. They want to show these gaming moments together with the media moments. It’s all about fandom at the end of the day.
The more people can experience all this together, the more utilization occurs. There’s some pretty good data around Last of Us; when the TV series came out on HBO, the sales surged, several hundred percent. It was quite phenomenal. And a bunch of players came back and played it again, which kind of points out to the fandom.
Even on Twitch, you can see it trending as well. It all feeds off each other, and it allows the fans to really sort of go into whatever modality they’re in the mood for. Maybe there’s a spouse that’s not as into the game as the other members of the family, but they can then participate in that by watching the series, which was obviously a great series. So in this case for Fallout, I watched episode one, and it sucked me in, so I’m assuming it sucked the fans in.
The way all those pieces of content work together, they will turn these temples into bigger and bigger temples, and they’ll be amplified by social.
Diving into Cross-Platform Research
All Things Insights: Just kind of a fun final question, but if you were given unlimited resources, what would you do to undertake to improve the gaming research and product development? What would be an innovative project that would be on your list?
Mike Lucero: You can’t do enough usability studies. What I really enjoyed actually that I think brought a ton of value to the Game Breaks experiences, the MediaScience studies we’re doing in the biometrics and all that. You get a combination of the sentiment but also the biometric feedback.
Obviously, we did that on Game Breaks, which was a 30- or 45-second experience. It showed where the eye was going and whether people are sweating or not and things like that. That’s a fairly expensive study. So doing those types of biometric studies, and this is just me sort of dreaming, but I think it’d be fascinating to do a higher quantitative study with more test subjects, really being able to dive into the sort of biometrics of the transmedia experiences and how that could manifest itself across cross platform or cross media type. I don’t know how that would possibly be structured, and it would probably cost a million dollars, but it seems like it’d be a pretty cool piece of research!
All Things Insights: Absolutely. That really brings us full circle in terms of the gaming experience, understanding the consumer and how insights and research play a role. You have a lot of great stories to tell. Good luck with your Media Insights keynote. Thanks so much for chatting with us today about the gaming world.
