TikTok and Variety Preview the Future of Gaming Trends at Inaugural Joint Leadership Summit

The $200 billion video game industry is increasingly blending with Hollywood, and this intersection was front and center at the inaugural Variety Presents: Gaming on TikTok Leadership Summit.

Held at the Edition in West Hollywood on Wednesday, the event drew an impressive lineup of industry heavyweights, including Neil Druckmann, CEO of Naughty Dog, Katherin Downing, director of platform partnerships at Riot Games, Leslie Poyatos, brand partnership manager at TikTok, Shen Gao, TikTok’s head of live operations in America, and Cameron Curtis, EVP of worldwide digital marketing at Warner Bros.

The day-long summit also gathered senior gaming industry executives and a handful of top social media creators and influencers who make a living posting their thoughts about new games and related lifestyle matters. Much of the day’s conversation revolved around the best paths to success in adapting gaming IP to TV and film. Druckmann, whose work at Naughty Dog, home of “The Last of Us” and “Uncharted” game franchises, recently scored as TV series and film adaptations, respectively weighed in.

“A TV show is a purely story-driven medium versus a game,” Druckmann said. “You have almost two genres. You have the story genre, and you have the interactive genre. Those are often not the same genre. The interactive genre maybe just should guide you in the kind of actions that you have. But you can’t be a slave to it, because often you’re breaking reality in the game to create a certain feeling through the interactivity that when you translate to [TV or film] and you don’t have that interactivity, it will feel off. It will feel strange. When trying to tell a realistic story, it’ll feel unrealistic.”

Druckmann spoke during a session that encompassed a live taping of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast with Cynthia Littleton, Variety co-EIC and co-host of the podcast, and Jennifer Maas, Variety‘s senior business writer, TV and games who spearheads all gaming coverage. The podcast episode featuring the interview will debut Sept. 25.

In addition to running the Santa Monica-based Naughty Dog banner, Druckmann is a multihyphenate who is a writer and director on HBO’s series rendition of “Last of Us.” He emphasized that gaming creatives have to realize that some things from the game canon have to be let go and vice versa. Creators who want to craft material that can work on many platforms also need to “trust that there is a difference between these mediums and certain things just cannot translate,” Druckmann said.

Another common thread discussed during the summit was the choppiness of gaming revenue in some major global markets coming into and out of the pandemic. Andrew Wallenstein, president and chief media analyst of Variety Intelligence Platform, set the stage with a deep dive into the economic drivers fueling the gaming sector’s explosive growth.

Wallenstein touched on how companies capitalized on the burst of gaming spurred by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and how companies have pursued mergers and acquisitions in the gaming realm. Activision Blizzard’s $69 billion sale to Microsoft was one of last year’s biggest M&A transactions in any sector. At the same time, with consolidation comes layoffs, which have hit gaming companies just as hard as in traditional studios and networks in recent months.

The conversation then veered into social media and the sheer dominance that a platform like TikTok has among Gen. Z. While Instagram seems to have a strong lead with Millennials, TikTok has found its home in the devices and screens of America’s youth. Wallenstein addressed the shrinking gap between traditional social media consumption and video consumption specifically, noting that all social media platforms have been eager to capitalize on the growing tidal wave that is the “short form” video space.

Advertising companies have also taken notice, opting to spend a majority of their advertisement spending on platforms that incubate that kind of content. As Wallenstein pointed out, however, this has come at the expense and loss of revenue for traditional entertainment venues like Hollywood and television.

“Social video advertising, that’s really the name of the game here. And the data, of course, is pretty clear that this is where the growth comes from. This is a zero-sum game, and it’s not as if there’s an infinite amount of dollars and a rising tide,” Wallenstein said “Linear television is probably losing money to social video advertising. There are just so many dollars to go around.”

Other highlights from the Summit:

Downing, director of platform partnerships for Riot Games, spoke of the importance of giving creators and influencers material to work with to inform the social media content they create around games.

“Short-form content is king, and that’s because it’s just so versatile,” Downing said. “You can have it be about a gameplay moment. You can have it be about a highlight. You can have it be about interactive challenges. One of the biggest ones, obviously, is UGC. That is where so many of our creators can come to life. And they want to make memes about our games, right? They want to show off their gameplay, and it lends itself to the sense of community while also letting them feel like they have a bit of ownership in ‘Valorant,’” Downing said. “The other thing that came out of this was dev talk. So dev talk is a thing, right? We saw a ton of engagement with our devs, and it was really great because it allowed them to have an opportunity to talk about the choices that they made to explain why maybe something was done on console differently than how it was done on PC, and at the end of the day, that lended a ton of credibility and authenticity to an audience.”

Cameron Curtis, executive VP of worldwide digital marketing at Warner Bros., was pressed about the art of using fan passion for selected games and franchises to help launch new content and keep games vibrant during long periods of no updates or new iterations. Curtis cited the studio’s experience this month with the theatrical launch of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” WB’s follow-up to 1988’s smash “Beetlejuice.”

“There’s a way in which you honor the original brand. You need to make sure that you’re not capitalizing on a trend that isn’t true or authentic to the brand itself,” Curtis said. “In the case of [‘Beetlejuice’ star] Jenna Ortega — she’s a brand, in addition to Beetlejuice being a brand, and what was so great is that we really benefited from the fact that she had recently done ‘Wednesday’ with Tim Burton on Netflix. ‘Wednesday’ was very adjacent and almost a sister of ‘Beetlejuice,’ if you think about the world. And we benefited from that. Folks that were uncertain about the Beetlejuice afterlife experience, but had watched ‘Wednesday’ on Netflix and understood the balance there. A lot of times, when we’re thinking about the brand, IP, first and foremost, we’re thinking about the creative and how we show up and making sure it’s authentic to the brand. But then we think about the talent we have involved and how they show up. There were a lot of young females who came to see ‘Beetlejuice’ who otherwise may or may not have been interested because of Jenna Ortega.”

Gao gave a tutorial on the evolution of live gaming on TikTok, who has been focused on building out the Western markets for gamers for the last three years on the social media platform. “We have millions of creators creating live content every day on TikTok,” Gao said. “That number is massive. On top of that, the viewership numbers are significant. One out of every few TikTok users are actually engaging with live TikTok. And not just in the sense of ‘Can I just watch it for a few seconds.’ We’re talking about tens and dozens of minutes.”

Adrienne Lahens, global head of operations at TikTok creator marketing solutions, discussed the intersection of generative AI and creators today for the panel “Level Up Your Creative Game: TikTok Symphony.”

Lahens emphasized the importance of thinking about creative not as a cost, but as an investment. TikTok discovered three key themes in a recently conducted study commissioned in partnership with Ipsos and Dentsu that helped answer the question, “How can we maximize our return on creative.” The first was about brands embracing “creative bravery.” “You need to be creating content that is educational, entertaining, inspiring, informative, you need to offer your audiences something of value,” Lahens said. “Secondly, you need to show up more. More volume and more variety is truly key to the TikTok ecosystem.” The third theme centered around combining the organic and the paid, “they work together on harmony on TikTok.”