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The Future of Gamification

Recently the term “Gamification” has been surrounded by a lot of excitement. For those of you that may not know, Gamification uses rewards, incentives and loyalty services to produce user and employee engagement in the chaotic world of apps, marketing and online life.

However, Gartner states in a new study that by 2014, 80% of all gamified apps will fail to do what they’ve set out to do.  According to Gartner research VP, Brian Burke, it comes down to bad design.  We see it often enough; companies & developers become obsessed with points and badges, instead of focusing on creating meaningful motivations and objectives to keep the user engaged.

The whole point of gamification is to engage the user and the only way to do that is to create objectives that motivate the user. 

The prediction made by Gartner, if proven to be true has some possibly discouraging consequences for gamified startup companies and possibly larger companies interested in using gamification. A few of the  companies that have or are currently using gamification either in their business models or via third-party apps are Foursquare,  Bunchball , Badgeville , SCVNGR, BigDoor,  and shopkick.

We are now seeing consolidation in companies using gamification. For instance, Gowalla sold to Facebook for $3 million and there is prediction that gamification platforms will be the next acquisition target for companies that sell services to enterprises. 

What we see here is that consumer apps have the highest profiles, and to that end enterprises have become some of the largest adopters of gamification techniques.   According to Gartner by 2015, some 40% of Global 1000 organizations will use gamification techniques to gain employee engagement in order to become more productive and gain more business.

All in all Gamification isn’t bad, once we get past all the hysteria and hot air surrounding gamification we can finally focus on the practical ideas and gamification techniques that work.