IN GAME ADVERTISING!!! Ok, I am sure that for most people this means nothing. But for the gaming world it has recently been a hot topic of debate. On one side you have the advertisers, who recently have become much more aggressive with their campaigns and in-game ad placement. On the other hand you have two groups of gamers; the first vehemently opposes in-game advertising, while the other thinks along the lines of “if it adds to the realism of the game, what’s the difference?”

Let’s look at each one respectively. The advertisers themselves are taking a big risk with this type of advertising. It is very, very new ground that goes beyond simple product placement. The best example of this right now is Second Life. For those of you that don’t know what Second Life is, it is just that, a second life, but online. It has recently attracted A LOT of attention from the advertising world. The big draw is that there are no rules here. The whole land is user created from the buildings, to the billboards to the economic system and companies are starting to pick up on this, recently there have been many companies opening “brick and mortar” stores in second life that reflect their real life stores and in some cases this has helped drive sales in the real world as well as help some of the players of Second Life make some real money. The beauty of this system is that like in the real world if you are skilled at something in-game you stand a good chance of making some real money (i.e. someone can hire you to build houses etc…) The real tell of all of this is that some websites track the conversion rate of Second Life money to U.S. Dollars. If you want to learn more check out secondlife.com and this wiki. Anyway, back to the point. Advertisers are doing a lot of interesting things within this game. They are helping to build the in-game economy, they are building stores and creating brands and branding. Eventually there will be designer clothing that you could buy in game to put on your character. It is very interesting and should be watched closely because essentially they are selling things that don’t exist except in digital form. (Weird.)

Next let’s look at the gamers. In the first instance in-game advertising in Second Life is actually a great experiment and stands almost as an exception to this whole argument. If we look at gamers and console gaming (ps2, gamecube, xbox) we see a completely different story. Console gamers are very loyal to the purity of video games and when they see advertisement popping up in there favorite lands they (me included) start to get a little angry. The point being, that we play video games to escape reality and to get a little rest from the real world, when we see familiar real life things start to pop-up it kind of ruins the experience. Advertisers need to respect the culture of gaming or risk having their games boycotted or rated poorly, which could also affect the publisher of the game. On the other hand, in game advertising will bring the price of video games down especially with the current console cycle coming up (wii, xbox 360, ps3). It is a double edged sword that will be debated for a long time coming.

I think that in-game advertising has the potential to be a very good thing, not only for advertisers but for gamers as well and as long as advertising never interrupts the gameplay, a la in-game commercial, gamers and advertisers should fall on neutral ground and be able to get along.

P.S. Check out this wired article http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70153-0.html. It is just one example of how people are making a substantial about of money online through Second Life.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 1:55 pm and is filed under internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.