Could we see Advertising in Console Games?

Some say money makes the world go round, others say it’s love. In reality it’s probably advertising and marketing. Marketing makes people love products or brands which in turn makes people lots of money, so maybe all of the above statements are true (After all, it sure isn’t gravity that makes the world go round, what a ridiculous idea!). Advertising is all around us these days, TV, cinema, billboards, newspapers, even now spamming our phones in some kind of Orwellian plan to melt our brains. Games on our phones regularly feature advertising, but how close are we to a future where advertising invades that little box under our TVs.

If you have an Xbox, advertising has already invaded that little box. The Xbox dashboard is already littered with adverts, so much so that the “Play Game” button is not the biggest onscreen. As mentioned games on phones regularly contain adverts, these games are all free to play and one of the most popular ways for developers to claw some cash back when the game doesn’t cost a penny. Free to play is becoming more and more popular bet is yet to truly manifest itself on consoles. There are countless numbers of free to play games on the PC and many of them are good if not fantastic. Games like Planetside 2 are almost, if not totally, the quality of a standard retail game that you buy. This is a game that never forces you to pay for anything, nor does it punish you harshly for being frugal. If free to play continues to take off and does also hit consoles, there’s a good chance we could be seeing adverts.

So how do I actually play a game?

So why is free to play so appealing? This, in an industry where developers are scrimping around trying just to survive and whose entire business model can depend on the success of a single game. As I’ve mentioned often, gaming is not mainstream like TV or film, so developers need to make it so if they want to survive. They need to attract more individuals to the market or need to persuade those already in the market to be spending more, the former is the easier option. By making games free to play consumers have no worry about making an investment, if they don’t like the game, they get rid without any fuss. When buying a normal game it is a risk, you may read reviews and be recommended by others, but at the end of the day, you may disagree with everyone else and hate the game you just bought for £40. That’s money down the drain and money that you may not want to spend on a game for some time. 

The increasing number of free to play games and the success of Steam sales shows that gamers are becoming less and less willing to play a high price for a game. Steam sales regularly present games for under £10, often under £5 and sometimes under £3. And these are for big mainstream titles, over Christmas, Deus Ex: Human Revolution cost roughly £3 on Steam. The industry is moving further and further away from the big £40-£50 game and it will be interesting to see how the new generation of consoles prices their games.

I aint paying £40 for a game I can get for free, that's £2 an hour!

Adverts are often annoying and frustrating to watch, particularly when targeted poorly. Many of us would love to be rid of them, this is a large part of the success of the BBC. It has no adverts so that you are not disturbed and its one hour shows are actually an hour as oppose to forty minutes. The success of free games on app markets shows that people are very willing to invest in a free game, even if it has adverts. The fact that it is free overrules any annoyances people generally have with adverts, particularly when they are tucked away and don’t really bother us. This formula goes beyond the games industry however. Freeview on TV, the channels you don’t have to pay a subscription for, they run purely on the power of adverts, generating large incomes. By being free, they have a larger market and so advertisers pay more because more people are watching the channel and by extension the adverts put on it. Advertisers pay huge amounts for television adverts and hence many TV channels continue to run in this form, with new channels popping up. For example, MTV, which you have to pay for, have a free channel, VIVA, in order to try and get the best of both worlds. In the newspaper industry, free newspapers are just as profitable as standard ‘pay for’ newspapers, thousands upon thousands of free newspapers are given away free every day on the London Underground as commuters go to work. When they return they sometimes get free magazines which also are profitable businesses. The newspaper industry is struggling to compete with new digital media on phones and computers, so some, like the Evening Standard, have gone free in order to stay afloat.

In a recession-hit world, many people have less disposable income and so will gladly take up an opportunity to get something for free, even if you have to go through a pesky advert. However, the key is that the advert cannot bother them. Gamers must feel they are not losing the experience due to an advert, they must not be put off by it. The advantage of the game being free cannot be outweighed by how annoying the advert is. This means advertisers are walking a tight line when balancing noticeable and persuasive without being pushy and annoying. If the advert detracts from the game, the game doesn’t get played and no one wins, except the consumer, they haven’t lost a penny.

"Those times when you're just waiting for the match to start"

Advertisers will want to be more and more successful and so will push the boundaries more and more of what is an acceptable level of advertising. People are greedy and so will push very hard, sometimes at the detriment of the user experience, though if the media being used is incredibly popular, companies know they can be increasingly pushy. Look at YouTube for example. It started with not adverts at all (a long time ago) then came up small pop ups when you were watching a video. Then came big adverts on the YouTube homepage that took up huge amounts of space. Then came adverts before a video starts, but that you can skip after five seconds. Now, there are even 30 second long adverts before a video starts which you cannot skip. If your video is one minute thirty seconds long, then adverts could potentially make up a quarter of the two minutes you spend on that video! This succession is a distinct possibility for games. They may only be small popups in corners of screens now, but you may soon have to watch a full length advert just to play Angry Birds and further into the future you may be waiting to start a Halo match online, but all 16 players have to sit and watch an advert first.

It will probably be a long time before adverts hit console gaming, but it is still a distinct possibility. Several other industries have succumbed to the allure of marketers, others forced into it by the economy or a dynamic market. Before we see adverts two things have to happen. Free to play really has to take off, by having a significant market share compared to standard retail games. Marketers also have to work out how to best utilise the gaming industry for advertising. There is still time for both those to happen and advertising will inevitably reach gaming, just as it will everywhere. By 2084 adverts will probably be messaged into our brains as Big Brother decides what is best for us and what we should all be buying, but until then, we have Apple for that.