Blizzard Entertainment CMO Monica Austin discusses Gen Z and gaming IP

Transcript

00:00Let's talk about Gen Z and its specific role in each of your companies because it's very different from company to company.

00:07Monica, since I picked on Chicken Jockey, which is a Minecraft reference, and Minecraft has blown up, and The Last of Us has blown up,

00:13and gaming has always been a huge force in entertainment, what is the role of Gen Z at Blizzard right now?

00:21Are they still sort of the lead for you all? Are you hot on Alpha? What is the role of Gen Z?

00:31Yeah, I mean, Gen Z, I'd say they are the core gaming. Blizzard has some of the biggest gaming IP that there is across PC and console,

00:41and we're talking about 10-year-old games, 20-year-old games, 30-year-old games.

00:45As you highlighted, gaming is one of the largest, if not the largest, entertainment medium in the world,

00:54and we're certainly seeing testament to Minecraft, testament to some of these massive IP coming from the gaming space

01:01that are blowing up across theatrical and other media landscapes,

01:07is that these cohorts, we want to call them this generation, is not only critical to our current games,

01:15but absolutely critical to what we're building for the future, and thinking about them as the new core

01:20that's going to come up and really define the types of games that we make,

01:24the types of ways that we reach out and connect to them and monetize for them,

01:28and certainly shaping the way we market to them kind of on a regular basis.

01:33And so, yeah, we think about it, and they're critical to our business.