I've been following news about Zynga's valuation closely and I couldn't help but wonder why there isn't much advertising in the more hardcore online gaming. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I haven't seen advertisements embedded in most of the games I've seen.
Imagine playing a soccer tournament on a hot summer day, and after hours of button pressing and player maneuvering, you beat your online community to the cup with a banner on the side promoting an ice cold beer.
It sounds logical to me. Target segment can be easily matched from the game genre and so there definitely is some potential for ad revenues. So why hasn't sony (playstation network) ,microsoft ( xbox live) or nintendo (not sure if there is an online component to that) leveraged their networks to cash in some advertising revenues?
2 comments:
Bilal, you bring up a great point. I blogged a couple of weeks ago about just this topic. I'm not a big gamer either by I was amazed to see an advertisement streamed to my PS3 while a game I was playing was still loading. I think you are dead on that this will become another avenue that content providers (in this case gaming consoles or online gaming networks) will use to generate additional revenue. I found the ads annoying and just tune them out but the benefit these advertisers have is that they deliver short ads to people who more or less have to watch them. There is no Tivo'ing load times for games (although caching data is quite common, there usually still are load times). There is already product placement in games and ads sold for the actual in-game content but I think there will be more integration of ads with the gaming experience. As long as companies are willing to play, gaming networks will be happy to collect the cash.
While I agree with you Nikhil about the future integration of ads into the game e.g. through sponsored content I am still surprised how many companies actually just stream their ads during game play. This is of course the cheapest way to advertise for companies with a limited budget that want to reach those gamers. One of the best examples I came across was Artix Entertainment. The company serves ads to each member of their free multiplayer gaming community each time their character dies during the game. Currently Artix members near 110 million - even it majority of these users will be paid subscribers, imagine the exposure your company can have if it can reach just 1-2% of this audience through simple streaming ads.
Post a Comment