Will Advertising In Mobile Games Work?

moneycontrol.com reports on “advergames” in India: Jump Games creating a mobile game on Thums Up for Coca Cola that received (an unlikely number of) 3,50,000 downloads each week. Venkat Malik, MD Level Up which publishes games online says that “Advertising within games has a huge potential to increase revenue for game publishers by 15%-20 %. Advertising of this kind is achieved with backdrops, site screen and branding around quests, in-game events.”

While advertising in mobile games might be an obvious way of further monetizing the medium, the issue still remains of introducing the advertising in the game without hindering or taking away from the game-play. A comScore study reveals that gamers are an attractive online advertising segment, but also (in my opinion) incorrectly claims that they aren’t opposed to advertising in games. I think users are actually resigned to the fact that advertising in games is inevitable, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they support it. Eventually, I think games without advertising will become more expensive because of the relatively lower returns to the content creator, or simply provide a lesser gaming experience since (I assume) more funds would result in better games. The real question is – what kind of returns, whether quantitative or qualitative will advergames give to the advertisers? It isn’t just a case of have money-will spend, is it?

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