Provide agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion industry.

One fact about the global video game market often surprises those who are not familiar with the industry.

"The video game industry is bigger than the music and film industries combined," said David Reitman, global head of games at Accenture, a strategy and technology services company. "When you make this kind of statement, you basically make people stop."

Although estimates of the value of the global gaming industry vary, market researchers usually set the direct revenue of video games at approximately US$180 billion to US$200 billion, including sales of hardware such as consoles, games, and controllers, as well as from other sources. Sources of income, such as game purchases and advertising.

In contrast, the global entertainment industry, including drama and home viewing, surpassed US$100 billion for the first time in 2019 before being hit by the pandemic in 2020. At the same time, the global record market will grow to 21.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.

These numbers provide insights into the scale of modern video games for about half a century. At this point, just watching other people play games is an activity with hundreds of millions of participants, and now games compete with all other forms of entertainment for attention.

Netflix acknowledged in a letter to shareholders in 2019: "Compared with HBO, we compete with Fortnite [and lose]."

Decades ago, fashion and sportswear brands used other forms of entertainment such as movies, sports, and music as marketing channels. Without the movie "American Gigolo," it's hard to imagine Armani’s legacy, or if Nike hadn’t bought sneakers for rookie basketball star Michael Jordan, what it would have become. Video games are a much younger medium, and fashion has only recently begun to notice it. The industry has recently begun to try to connect with gamers, and these efforts have accelerated in the past year.

One reason for fashion players to express interest is that games provide a potential source of revenue from digital clothing and product sales. But perhaps more importantly, they are a way for brands to extend themselves into virtual spaces where people spend more and more time. They represent a relatively untapped marketing channel in which creative companies can create immersive interactive experiences, unlike any experience that other media cannot provide.

At the same time, people have developed a keen interest in the concept of meta-universe. The term originated from science fiction and is usually imagined as a virtual counterpart parallel to the real world. It is likely to be a patchwork of different online platforms. Fortnite and Roblox And other popular games have become the most obvious sites for their foundation. Now, the former Facebook group Meta is investing billions of dollars in an attempt to turn this vision of Metaverse into reality. Many fashion companies have made slow progress in embracing e-commerce and have spent several years building their own digital businesses, determined not to be late in the future.

This case study examines some of the most important recent efforts by fashion and beauty companies to reach gamers and analyzes their strategies to examine opportunities and barriers to participating in game marketing:

The two companies told BoF what their goals were, how to make the project fruitful, and their knowledge of video games and game players.

Digital fashion and avatar decoding

Case studies created specifically for BoF professional members explore the important challenges facing the industry today. Find more case studies and reports from fashion business here.

Editor's note: This case study was revised on December 1, 2021. Earlier versions recognized Doggo images in Fortnite as images used for billboards and real-world locations in the game. That is incorrect. This image shows user-generated content that appears in Fortnite as part of the "Living Lookbook" campaign.

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