New Advertising Frontier: Games
Video games are starting to get a whole lot of attention from advertisers. After all, there are many corporations with many things to sell to the coveted 18-34 year-old demographic.
But advertising in video games isn't like marketing on television or radio. Since each video game title is a world unto itself, advertisements placed inside that world can pollute it and make it uninhabitable. Gamers won't touch it if it becomes fouled with evil ads.
To that end, there are companies whose business is to guide other businesses through the gaming universe. Two such chaperons are IGN Entertainment and Massive Inc.
Massive says it is the world's first video game advertising network, coming into existence for the purpose of delivering ads through games.
And they have quite a few Big Names behind them: Coca-Cola, Comcast's G4TV, Dunkin' Donuts, Universal Music Group and Verizon have signed on. Through Massive these companies can reach anyone playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory or Anarchy Online on the web.
Truth be told, Massive has done a very good job implementing advertisements into the games that they oversee.
In the case of Splinter Cell, where you're creeping through city streets, the ads actually make sense. Of course one will see billboards and poster advertisements when walking through Manhattan, so why not bring that into video games? The same goes for the sprawling metropolis in Anarchy Online, where gamers supposedly told Massive that the in-game advertising enhanced their playing experience. The reason these ads work is because they're subtle and inconspicuous.
If you enjoy either of those games, then you're already experiencing in-game advertising. One can see that Massive is running a tight ship.
They know what ads you're looking at, for how long and even what angle you're viewing them from. This isn't just product placement, either. Advertisers have the ability to update ads in real-time when gamers are online.
We are not endorsing Massive over IGN, but we can at least see what was going on in these games. To their credit, Massive is very open about how they do business.
We only trust what we can see. As such, we're suspicious of IGN.
We haven't seen any working versions of their in-game advertising software. All we have to look at are theoretical diagrams and pictures. How gameplay will be affected is unknown, but if the pictures are any indication of the final product, we're hesitant to give it the all clear.
Giant billboard ads with video; interactive ads where you can enter your information and get a couple bucks off of your next Happy Meal. It looks interesting but distracting.
IGN believes that their standing as a premiere web destination for gamers and their working relationship with video game publishers will help them come out ahead of competitors.
Even if IGN has a leg up because of a core fan base, they don't have all the pieces. When I spoke to them before E3, their software was in development and they were "working on a few deals" that they couldn't talk about.
Most gamers know IGN. They own too much online not to be noticed: ign.com, gamespy.com, Fileplanet, TeamXbox, 3Dgamers, planetdoom.com, planethalflife.com, haloplanet.com, and "more than 70 Planet and community sites." They also own Rottentomatoes.com, just bought AskMen.com and get content from G4TV.
As far as IGN is concerned, we see a vast internet monopoly-in-training adding to its corporate waistline. Their recent pursuits also give more weight to IGN's already problematic conflicts of interest.
IGN has its own software inside over 300 titles: Gamespy Arcade. And they've signed a deal with Nintendo to help provide a WiFi network for GameBoy DS users. And there was recently an incident where a GameSpy writer's criticism of a Nintendo title was altered without his consent to be more positive towards the software.
Can we expect them to be objective in a situation that requires them to hand a scathing review to a corporate companion?
This is part of the reason sites like Kotaku, Joystiq, Game Girl Advance and Game Revolution are so desperately needed. They are independent; they aren't constrained by the relationships their parent companies might have within the game industry. But that is for another day and really, IGN got to where it is because they know how to do business. One has to respect it, though not necessarily like it.
Massive Inc. isn't pretending to be an objective games news source (objective games journalism -- a misnomer in its own right -- cannot really exist anyway since one key purpose of video games is to illicit a highly personalized response from the player.). Massive is what it says it is: an advertising solution for companies looking to sell product via video games.
IGN, on the other hand, is signing deals with game companies and looking to profit directly from the success of one game that they're purporting to have an objective, editorial standpoint on.
There is both a bright and bleak future for advertising in video games. We can only hope that among the developers, publishers, advertisers, independent reporters, Massive and IGN, games come out in favor of the gamer.
By William Vitka and Chad Chamberlain