TERRITORY REPORT: BENELUX & NORDIC Europe’s melting pot
Benelux and the Nordic territories are a mish-mash of cultures, languages and currencies. James Batchelor investigates how a fragmented retail landscape has still managed to grow the games industry.
Retailers in Sweden’s big cities such as Stockholm (pictured) have reported big sales of Kinect and PC titles over Christmas
BOTH THE Benelux and Nordic games markets are victims of their own diversity.
The former is comprised of three neighbouring countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), while the latter is less of a recognised entity and more of an umbrella term given to an area of Northern Europe. Naturally, this means that when it comes to publishing, distributing and retailing video games complications arise when targeting such a broad range of consumers, languages and cultures.
CASUAL SUCCESS
CASUAL GAMING is bigger than ever in both the Benelux and Nordic markets. This is largely due to the growing popularity of online browser- based games.
Publisher Easy Interactive has been quick to capitalise on this market trend by producing boxed versions of popular browser games.
www.mcvuk.com
“Casual games have always enjoyed a warm reception in the region, but last year there was a significant increase in demand for these titles, which we think is related to the rise of browser-based gaming,” says MD Michel van Elmpt.
“In light of this, we picked up the rights to a wide range of PC-based
Flash games in 2010 and have released DS versions. We also increased our marketing budget on casual games, with big TV campaigns. “This strategy worked well for us and we saw our market share on DS double in 2010. Despite gloomy ecomonic conditions, the right strategies can foster growth.”
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“The main characteristic of our territory is that we have to deal with a wildly multi-lingual market: Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium, French and German in both Belgium and Luxembourg,” says CLD Distribution CEO Jacques Leboutte. “We also have to cope with a lot of different retailers – particularly in Belgium and Luxembourg – on a quite tiny market of around 25m people.” Leboutte says varying tastes within these small markets doesn’t help either, anecdotally highlighting how southern Belgium’s appetite for
“
Nordic retailers focus on strong titles as well as budget and pre- owned titles.
Martin Sirc, Koch Media
manga-based titles like Dragon Ball is in complete contrast to that of their northern neighbours. In fact, according to GfK figures, the biggest game overall in Nordic countries was Call of Duty. But in Sweden, World of Warcaftand Kinect were the biggest sellers.
RISING TO THE CHALLENGE Firms in these regions are used to such intricacies but the economic decline of the last few years have made things much more difficult. Businesses have been forced to find
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