Friends of 150:

Activision, one of our favorite brands since childhood, and publisher of some of the worlds biggest video games — Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, Skylanders and Crash Bandicoot, has chosen space150 as Social Agency of Record for their two industry leading game franchises: Call of Duty and Destiny. We will be leading social strategy and execution for both titles from our Venice, CA office. Gaming is a huge part of our background and culture, and we couldn't be more jacked about this. My father, Jack Jurewicz, was a distributor of Activision games in the early 80s. I used to sell Pitfall out of my Jr. High locker to the kids weeks before Target could get their hands on them. Oh how far we've come.

In the time we've been a partner with Activision, we've produced some amazing fan-fueled social content, and helped them announce and reveal the upcoming fall release: Call of Duty, Black Ops 4. E3, the huge industry show for videogames, has just wrapped in LA, and you can see some of our work on Call of Duty's Instagram feed.

Our focus with Activision is all about the fans, and as gaming continues to connect with and influence pop culture, we're right in the middle of it with Activision.

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Speaking of Videogames

One interesting thing is how much time people spend watching other people play videogames. The 2017 stats from Twitch show that last year, on Twitch alone, people spend over 5.9 billion hours watching people play games (that's 246 million days). Each month, over 2 million people stream on Twitch, and 15 million unique people tune in daily. These are 2017 end-of-year numbers, and this is growing fast, so these numbers are likely higher today. Destiny 2 set a record last year, with over 436,000 people simultaneously watching the reveal on Twitch.

Traditional celebrities are also connecting with the new streaming stars — Drake and Ninja recently set a record: over 628,000 people watched them stream together. It's clear that a lot of attention is shifting to games, creating a new type of celebrity in the process.

Attention Leads to Investment

In 2017, the NBA and Take-Two Interactive announced the NBA 2K League: a professional eSports league played using NBA 2K18, the videogame. While the games are virtual, the stakes are real: there was a full draft, and players will earn salaries and housing, and have the potential to get a slice of a $1,000,000 prize pool. The NBA has been very progressive in it's online and digital approach, and this has now been extended into an eSports version of the original league. A video recap of the first day of the NBA 2K League can be seen here, and it's worth checking out.

As eSports are growing, there are games designed from the start to operate as a league. There are also progressive organizations like the NBA working hard to make the crossover from the past into the future.

Mixed Reality + The Void

Speaking of crossovers, we're big fans of virtual reality and augmented reality, and think they're especially powerful when you blend them to create experiences with the real physical world. A company called The Void is at the leading edge of this space, and they've recently launched a mixed reality experience next to Disneyland: Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire. This was done in partnership with Disney and ILMxLAB, the research and development arm of Industrial Light and Magic. Many of us at space150 have seen this, and it's worth your time to see where the future of this is going, raising the bar for consumer expectations. The Void just announced an expansion to nine new cities, so they're seeing success and growing with this unique approach to VR.