Karol Severin

Karol is a co-founder and Research Director at MIDiA. With over a decade of experience in consumer research, industry analysis, and consulting, Karol oversees the direction, coverage and quality of all MIDiA’s research output. Prior to co-founding MIDiA, Karol gained experience in TMT market research and consulting, as well as an entertainment industry startup founder. He holds a business management degree from Queen Mary, University of London, with specialisation in strategy, quantitative methods, and entrepreneurship.

Is Microsoft the flywheel for Meta’s VR efforts?

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Karol Severin

13 Oct 2022

Xbox and Meta announced a partnership bringing the Xbox Game Pass and cloud gaming experiences to Meta Quest 2 VR headsets. Meta Quest 2 users will be able to enjoy Xbox’s cloud gaming experience without the need to own an Xbox console.

min read

Games’ cultural role in the 2020s

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Karol Severin

September 2022

Epic Games

Cultural trends

Over time, games have carved out their role from the cultural fringes, through tobecoming a firmly established part of digital-consumer culture. Now, they have the opportunity to become theepicentreof digital culture. To do so, gaming needs (and has already started) to evolve from a standalone pastime towards a destination for all other forms of entertainment.

Meta and games
The race between user interface and content

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Karol Severin

September 2022

Cultural trends

Read the case study …

Quick take: Are Netflix’s games efforts still in line with the consumer needs of today?

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Karol Severin

29 Sep 2022

It has been a year since Netflix announced its first games studio acquisition. Two days ago, it announced the launch of its own in-house gaming studio based in Finland, bringing a fourth gaming studio into its arsenal.

min read

What Gamescom and PAX West tell us about games’ cultural relevance in the 2020s

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Karol Severin

15 Sep 2022

cultural insight

Over the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to present at both Gamescom in Cologne, and PAX West in Seattle. It has been a few years since I visited Gamescom. Back then, I wrote about how gaming has fully established itself as a cultural phenomenon and was edging towards the mainstream.

min read

Attention inflation
How multitasking is reshaping the attention economy

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Karol Severin and Perry Gresham

August 2022

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

Entertainment hours are up, but consumption is becoming diluted and losing focus, and is increasingly in the background of other activities. Audiences want to consume more but have no more time to allocate; increased multitasking is the result. Consequently, attention / focus is split between more propositions.

Games genre fan overlaps across entertainment

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Karol Severin and Kazia Rothwell

August 2022

Games

niche audiences

gaming culture

Entertainment genre overlaps of games genre fansQ2 2022 This report presents a snapshot of cross-entertainment (music, video, and sports) genre preferences of consumers who are fans of a particular games genre. It includes the following games genre fan segments: Action games fans First person shooter (FPS) fans Role playing game (RPG) fans Sports games fans Strategy games fans Simulator games fans Puzzle games fans Sandbox games fans Platformer games fans Open world games fans The data in this report is from MIDiA Research’s Q2 2022 consumer survey.

PlayStation and Xbox exchange PR blows amid the Activision deal approval process

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Karol Severin

19 Aug 2022

Sony and Xbox exchanged PR salvos last week as Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision came under regulatory scrutiny in Brazil. Within it, companies got an opportunity to comment on the impacts of the acquisition.

min read

Re-creating the creator economy

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Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Srishti Das, Kriss Thakrar, Ashleigh Millar, Tatiana Cirisano, Annie Langston and Richard Broadhurst

August 2022

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

Streaming first democratised the means of consumption, then distribution, and now production. Though the promise of the long tail may not have materialised quite as expected, long-tail and mid-tail creators are now a central component of the digital-entertainment economy.

Are ‘picture-perfect’ games marketing campaigns detrimental to building continued engagement?

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Karol Severin

1 Aug 2022

games marketing

Last week, my social media feeds were taken over by the release of Stray (the ‘cat game’) trying to grab my attention. I suppose that this was to be expected – I’m a cat-owning games analyst after all.

min read

Profiling smart-TV owning gamers

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Karol Severin and Kazia Rothwell

July 2022

Games

Audience Insight

Smart TVs are to play a growing role in the games industry’s value chain TVs have always been an instrumental piece of hardware for console gamers to enjoy gameplay. With gameplay processing moving towards the cloud, and becoming more hardware-agnostic as a result, smart-TV makers will begin to carve out their own market share in games distribution.

The average gamer plays more than one hour per day, as time spent takes centre stage

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Karol Severin

8 Jul 2022

games consumption

gamer engagement

Over the last two decades, the business models of video games have progressively shifted from unit-sales-led towards engagement-led. This is due to a combination of factors; including the rise of in-game spending, subscription services, and interactive digital worlds that have become venues for experiences way beyond just gameplay in its traditional sense.

min read

Samsung is becoming an important games distribution player, as the ‘gaming TV market’ comes to life

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Karol Severin

4 Jul 2022

Samsung is establishing itself as a serious player in the distribution part of the games industry’s value chain through its ‘Gaming Hub’. Having already partnered with GeForce Now and Stadia games subscriptions, Samsung also recently announced its partnership with Xbox.

min read

Games consumption Q1 2022
Time spent takes centre stage

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Karol Severin

June 2022

games consumption

Attention economy

time spent on games

Time spent on games is growing in importance as a key performance indicator for the games industry.Whether it is games subscription services deciding which titles and publishers to prioritise in terms of partnerships, or individual games assessing which distributor or console ecosystem to strike an exclusive deal with, right through to planning effective marketing campaigns and product strategies, the average time spent on games and the monitoring of relevant gamer segments will play an increasingly important role.

Can Gamescom retain its appeal going forward?

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Karol Severin

23 Jun 2022

I remember attending my first Gamescom as an analyst in 2017 . The sheer excitement as gaming was eating the world whole, and before brands and just about everybody else woke up to gaming as a mainstream cultural phenomenon.

min read

Quick take: Why Xbox All Access could be the ultimate recession winner

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Karol Severin

17 Jun 2022

global recession

Xbox All Access has been around for a while now, though with a limited reach (currently only available in 12 markets). While it was always going to play an integral part in Xbox’s cross-platform (and ultimately console-less) future, its uptake, or even appeal, may have been lost among flashier news around big acquisitions, as well as developments with cloud gaming or Game Pass.

min read

Xbox to rid large games of a key competitive weapon

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Karol Severin

10 Jun 2022

games streaming

Xbox is looking simply unstoppable these days. After announcing the Xbox Everywhere vision, it has confirmed that besides the announced ‘puck’ in the works, it is indeed bringing the Xbox App into Samsung’s 2022 smart TVs.

min read

Profiling single-player versus multiplayer gamers
A generational changing of the guard

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Karol Severin

May 2022

Xbox

Facebook

Twitter

Though single player remains the preferred games genre for now, multiplayer modes are catching up, particularly among younger gamer segments. As audiences age, multiplayer modes will become increasingly important alongside single-player modes. Both segments will remain important for games companies to pay attention to in the mid to long-term.

The Attention Recession
How inflation and the pandemic are reshaping entertainment

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Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

May 2022

Video

Music

Games

With the recent announcement of the 0.2 million subscriber drop in Netflix’s Q1 2022 figures, and Spotify seeing slower paid user growth, MIDiA’s predicted attention recession has come into fruition. MIDiA’s in-house analysts take you through the key insights and trends of this new chapter and its implications across music, video, games, marketing, and audio industries.

Single player vs. multiplayer | A generational changing of the guards or a bifurcation of gamer behaviours?

Cover image for Single player vs. multiplayer | A generational changing of the guards or a bifurcation of gamer behaviours?

Karol Severin

26 May 2022

Though the roots of the multiplayer mode go back decades, online multiplayer games have been taking the world by storm in more recent years. Here is where things stand at the moment: 57% of gamers prefer single-player over multiplayer games, compared to 22% who prefer multiplayer games.

min read

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