Potential of Ingame Advertising

March 14, 2006 on 10:31 am | In MMO (Live), Playstyles

Now fourth in a series, yet another game signs on Massive Entertainment to provide ingame advertising within their MMO world.

I find this to be rather odd timing for the game. Auto Assault is not out yet, and while it is certainly a unique title in a genre dominated by iterations of a familiar experience, its potential success is simply unknown. Cyberpunk sci-fi has not had the strongest success in this genre, license or not. So advertising in an as-yet unproven and naturally risky title is interesting. There's, of course, good reasons for this as well.

But this isn't about AA.

To this day, people still question the merit of ingame advertising. Oh, there's also the cadre of folks who hate the very concept of ingame advertising, but that's been talked to death. My view is very simple: if it works for the game by not detracting from the experience, I don't mind.

And the reason I don't mind is linked to why I think some question the merit of it.

Games aren't really considered "serious" places in which to advertise, at least insofar as serious advertisers are concerned. I think part of the problem is that while games can be hyped into hundreds of thousands in sales, there's such a high churn rate that attention is lost rather quickly. Further, games themselves have not really been taken seriously as an industry until rather recently, and mostly because of negativity. Plus there's still that whole sting of the dot.com bust, fueled in part by the less-than-stellar performance of Banner Ads.

I think Banner Ads are different from ingame advertising though.

Banner ads on a web page can be fairly obnoxious, grabbing the eye through flash and pizazz. But it still requires someone click on it. And then wherever that person goes, they need to click on something else, stay in the site for awhile, and ultimately, make some sort of purchase as a result. That entire chain is a descent in probability to something pretty low I imagine.

Ingame advertising can be a bit different though, transcending simple one-dimensional ad to another emergent form of advertisement seen in TV and movies: Product Placement. And this achieves something no banner ad nor 15 or 30 second TV commercial could ever do so well:

Provide relevance.

Ingame Advertising isn't just about ingame billboards. It could also be, and has already sometimes been, about the world and other objects used in and around the game space. It's about using a Browning 9mm gun instead of just a 9mm, drinking Coke instead of Generic_Powerup_00 or driving a Ferrari instead of some car stylers wet dream.

Games, like TVs and Movies, can all use product placement to link properties to protagonists, items to objectives, and therefore the player to relevant intellectual properties that may inspire purchase in other mediums. It's not easy of course, but that's where I think the promise is for those who think there's promise.