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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How you doing today? Um A bit of maybe a disconnect on the topics today, but I think they're actually um intimately connected. I want to talk to you about service delivery and Fortnite. Now you've probably heard of Fortnite. If you've been around any 12 year olds, you've definitely heard of Fortnite.
Um It is 100 person Battle Royale. Um free to play game that's actually free to play. Um It's making money, hand over fist though because they charge for um digital goods within the game, but they don't affect gameplay. It's all cosmetic. But what I wanted to talk to you about around Fortnite was how they're delivering this service.
And more importantly how they continue to people keep people engaged in delivering this service. So they just dropped what they call season seven. So season seven costs about 10 bucks um for people to play and it's a series of 100 tiers of challenges.
And at each of these tiers you unlock, you get more experience points or you get some in-game currency or you get an outfit or a background or a piece of music or something. Nothing that affects game play and that's absolutely critical. Nothing in the game, uh that you can buy, actually affects the game play.
You can start with a brand new account and be on equal footing with everybody else. Uh, but they do have this system of, um, having these seasons and you can buy access to the tiers of rewards for the seasons, but every season is still free to play.
So they have this entire structure of free to play service um delivery uh on this cadence of, you know, every couple of months, they drop a new season and it's on a regular, uh I think it's 10 weeks, 10 weeks or 11 weeks.
So they set up an expectation in delivering this service to you. Um But also they are keeping the content compelling enough to get you to upgrade um to a uh or upgrade, but to pay money to get these virtual skin. So if you bought the battle pass for season seven, which is winter themed, you can get this totally ripped and shredded military Santa.
Um you know, things like that, you can skin the vehicles you're playing in, you can take different uh background for the loading screen, all this just pure cosmetic stuff. But I think it's a fascinating use case around service delivery. And I think within security and definitely within security and privacy, we don't um look outside the box enough and we think, ok, we're going to deliver a security program and here's how we're gonna do it.
We're gonna talk about fishing and we're gonna talk about that in a really antiquated way. Or we're gonna talk about passwords and, you know, we're not going to really dive into, um, delighting customers or engaging them. Now, you're not gonna have the level of engagement that Fortnite does.
Um, right. They have, uh, millions of concurrent players, um, 100 and 20 some million plus signed up overall. Um really, really interesting use case and you're never gonna get to that scale. But I think, you know, setting expectations, which is something Fortnite does with the seasons.
So there's a set expectation that every 10 weeks, the game map is going to change and the story that sort of supporting this game is gonna move along and there's gonna be new tactics and techniques that you're gonna have to learn because they keep tweaking the game mechanics that happens every 10 weeks, um sometimes faster with special events.
Um They also do this delicate balance of making sure that things that change your appearance aren't um so readily available. Uh but they also so aren't so hard that you can't get them to keep this level of engagement up with the financial side of the, of the uh game.
And I think that adds up to be an extremely fascinating balance um to keep people coming back to make sure they don't get bored, um to keep them constantly engaged and that's something we need to do in security. We need to make sure that users are constantly engaged, um, to make the right decision around risk of information or risk to the business.
But we don't do that very well at all. We don't keep, we don't get people engaged, let alone keeping them engaged and yet we keep going back to the same. Well, I can't tell you the number of organizations that I've been to, um, that I've seen parts of their, uh it security awareness, which is a term, I hate it, security awareness campaigns.
And they've been the exact same thing as a completely different company. And, you know, in the back of my head, I'm thinking a, oh, this again, b there's no way that your company culture is the exact same as that other company then that would make this campaign effective.
So why are you doing it? It's because somebody googled, um, you know, information security awareness campaign or, or they talked to, uh, you know, they looked at one of the main um certification companies and said like, hey, what do you have?
And they basically pull from the standard. Well, and you know, as to be expected, the results are just as bad as everybody else. So we need to think outside the box and that continues not just into things like awareness and education campaigns, but into rolling out new services within your company um to building new applications and solutions for your company.
You need to keep people engaged. This is not uh hey, they work for me. They've got to use this kind of situation. So, you know, looking outside the box is something like Fortnite, which by the way is just fun. Um is a really good uh way to kind of spice up what you're doing.
Now, I'm not suggesting you start a battle royale within your organization, but figuring out how to release content on a regular cadence to keep people engaged, to keep people informed. Um Figuring out how to get user buy in, you want people to feel invested in whatever you're rolling out, whether that's an education campaign, a new tool.
Um You know, uh anything and everything, uh you need people, you need users to use what you're doing otherwise, what's the point? Um So just to kind of offbeat fascinating little conversation for you, um Hopefully that'll get you thinking, maybe that'll give you something to do in your spare time over the weekend.
Let me know what you think online at Mark NC A. Uh For those of you in the vlogs in the comment down below. And uh as always by email me at Mark N dot C A, how do you keep users engaged in whatever service you're delivering?
I'm really curious to hear. I hope you are set up for a fantastic day and a wonderful weekend. Uh We'll talk to you soon.
