Real Adding Ads to Casual Games

In another note about advertising in the gaming industry, it seems Real is seeing only 2% of people buy its trial games, so has decided to put ads in the game space to generate revenue from the other 98%. This on top of the fact that the company gets a large portion of its revenues from gaming:

For the past two years, the popularity of casual games has helped RealArcade grow at twice the rate of the rest of the company. In its most recent quarter, RealNetworks took in $18.6 million from games, or more than 20 percent of the company's total quarterly revenue. The revenue came not only from games downloaded at RealArcade, but also from games that RealNetworks has licensed to other casual game sites.

Starting this week, players who download the RealArcade games and play them for only an hour will have to view short commercials.

The company is also heavily investing in games as a future revenue generator; RealNetworks spent $36 million to acquire the casual game company GameHouse Inc. in 2004 and $15 million for a mobile-game company called Mr. GoodLiving Ltd. last year.

Remember when Real was known only for its audio solutions? Times change...

More info here.