How In-Car Gaming is Transforming Passenger Entertainment and Boosting Revenue

People have been gaming in cars since the advent of handheld devices. If you were born in the 1990s, there is a reasonably good chance that you have fond memories of playing Pokemon Red on your Gameboy during a long drive to visit relatives.

“In-car Gaming” accomplishes basically the same thing but in a more cooperative format. Now, multiple players can participate using their phones and the car’s console screen.

Why This Move Boosts Revenue

In-car gaming is currently primarily available in luxury vehicles. It debuted as a feature in BMWs through a partnership with a gaming company called AirConsole.

Here’s how Stefan Putz of BMW described the concept: “It’s about satisfying a real desire out in the market. There is a desire for gaming, and it might not be a buying criteria, where a customer says, ‘I only bought this BMW because of this game,’ but it’s part of the product characteristics.”

That makes sense. No one is going to buy an $80,000 sedan because it has a virtual Uno game. They also don’t exactly buy cars for the seat warmers or the premium leather upholstery. Most people select their rides based on the accumulated features.

Here’s how Jackson Vaughan at Konvoy Ventures sees things: “Cars are eventually going to become fully self-driving, but I think the question is, what are people going to do while they’re commuting? And I think car companies want to make sure that what happens to TVs and the cable networks in the living room doesn’t happen to them.”

How In-Car Gaming Works

The format is pretty simple. Car operators pull up a game using the center console screen. Players jump into the game using their cell phones. Currently, the games can only be played while the car is in park.

Certainly, this narrows the utility of the feature considerably. It could be used as a way to wait out charging times for EVs or kill the idle moments between arriving at an event early and walking in.

Step One On a Long Road

A true gamer won’t find much to be excited about at this stage of in-car gaming. Yes, you can play sim games. Racing games. Sports games. You can even play mobile casino games, such as online slots and poker, for real money or just for fun.

There are plenty of platforms that allow online and offline gaming and are available to download in the App Store and in the Play Store.

Slightly Superfluous?

If there is a limiting factor, it’s simply that in-car gaming doesn’t do much to improve upon the options that are already available to people.

When you can do it, you have a fairly small number of games to choose from. There are about 145 games currently available on OpenAir. Respectable, but flimsy stacked against, say, the Apple Store, which has hundreds of thousands of titles at the ready. What’s more, only twenty-nine of their titles are currently vehicle-compatible.

And these aren’t Triple-A titles either. Where Netflix, with its mobile gaming integration, was able to offer Grand Theft Auto, OpenAir offers hangman?

Some of the titles are a little more glitzy, but you get the point. There are already lots of ways to game on the go. Many of them even allow you to collaborate with people in the car with you.

What do you need with a BMW, or a Tesla, or an OpenAir account when you can already play Mario Kart on the Switch, or choose from any of the many thousands of multiplayer games available on your average app store?