GameStop stock price tanks after Microsoft announces new digital-gaming service
Guest Contribution
Design and content sprints are the key to bringing together product owners, about it designers, researchers, content strategists, and other disciplines into one tight-knit team. They’re a mix of content strategy, behavioural science, UX and more, in a process anyone can use.
Sprints make it possible to compress months of work into a week or less. Instead of waiting to find out if an idea will work, you can get early feedback from a design and content prototype. Teams can use sprints to look ahead at how things will work or break, based on audience reaction. And all without building fully featured, expensive products.
Steve Fisher, the founder of Canadian UX, content strategy and web technology consultancy the Republic of Quality, is an expert in design and content sprints, and we’re thrilled he will be running a full-day workshop on this subject at Generate New York on 27 April.
In it, you’ll learn how to:
- Get the right setup for a successful sprint. Who should be on your team? How should you structure the sprint? What prep work needs to be done?
- Map out the sprint, set a vision with the end in mind, and dig deep into the problem you’ll be solving
- Sketch multiple solutions as a team
- Create a storyboard and journey maps that guide prototype creation
- Create a testable prototype (you can use code or not in this part!)
- Do quick and useful user testing with your customers
For more on content sprints, check out our interview with Google Ventures’ Braden Kowitz or watch the talk by his partners Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky at last year’s Generate San Francisco conference:
Steve Fisher is featured in a five-page interview in the latest issue of net magazine, and he will also give a keynote on why conflict is the key to great UX at Generate New York.
If you buy a combined workshop and conference pass for Generate New York you will save $125! Other topics covered at Generate New York include practical frontend solutions, design systems, user research, information architecture, ecommerce and web performance, productivity hacks and much more.
If you can’t make it to the NYC conference, there’s also one in San Francisco on 9 June. Tickets are on sale now!
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Microsoft announced today that it is introducing a new premium membership program for Xbox One that will give players instant access to scores of digital games, and Wall Street is viewing that move as somewhat hostile toward one of the world’s biggest gaming retailers.
GameStop’s stock price has dropped nearly 8 percent today following Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealing the Xbox Game Pass service. This is a program where Xbox One owners can pay $10 per month to have unlimited access to over 100 Xbox One and backward-compatible Xbox 360 games. Of course, these are all digital games that you download from Microsoft’s Xbox Game Store, and it’s likely that investors are seeing this as a major threat to GameStop.
And an instant library on a console like Xbox One could potentially eat into GameStop’s sales. The brick-and-mortar retailer makes quite a lot of its money from secondhand sales where it resells products that consumers have traded in. If more people are playing digital games, that takes product out of the supply chain that could end up on GameStop store shelves. Additionally, Game Pass looks like it will primarily traffick in older games that people would typically would purchase used. Older releases like Mad Max, Saints Row IV, and Halo 5 are some of the big options that Microsoft is highlighting.
Above: Microsoft wants to hook you up with a massive library for your Xbox One.
Image Credit: Microsoft
Of course, GameStop isn’t completely removed from the digital-gaming ecosystem. The retailer sells a lot of currency cards for the Xbox Store, the PlayStation Store, the Steam PC-gaming portal, and it’s possible that people who don’t like using a credit card will purchase cards to buy their subscription to Game Pass through GameStop.
But that will likely not make up for a dearth of used-game sales or trade-ins if a lot of people adopt a Game Pass subscription.
