Advertising in Gaming: Could It Actually Work?
For years, the idea of advertising in video games has been treated with a certain amount of suspicion. Gamers have become accustomed to publishers finding new ways to monetise their audiences, from downloadable content and season passes to battle passes, cosmetic items and microtransactions. So the prospect of adverts appearing inside games is hardly likely to receive an enthusiastic welcome from everyone.
Yet advertising in gaming is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Microsoft is testing ad-supported Xbox game streaming, while EA has launched its own advertising division to explore opportunities for brands within its games.
At the same time, developers are increasingly experimenting with partnerships that blur the line between advertising and content.
The interesting question, therefore, may no longer be whether advertising will find its way further into gaming, but whether the industry can find a way of doing it without damaging the experience that players have paid for.
Microsoft's approach is perhaps the most straightforward. Its current Xbox test involves advertising being shown before a gaming session rather than interrupting gameplay. The attraction for the platform is obvious: advertising creates another potential source of revenue and could help support lower-cost access to games. For players, there is at least a recognisable trade-off. If advertising helps make a service cheaper or more accessible, some people may be willing to accept it.
That is a very different proposition from putting adverts into a £70 game, however. The expectation changes when someone has already paid for the product, and publishers will need to be conscious of that distinction.
EA's plans take the idea in another direction. With EA Advertising, the company is looking at ways brands can appear within its games through dynamic advertising, branded content and interactive experiences. This opens up possibilities that are considerably more interesting than simply showing a video advert before a game starts.
The sports world provides an obvious opportunity. Advertising is already an integral part of professional sport. Watch a football match and there are sponsors on the shirts, advertising boards around the pitch, digital displays in the stadium and branding throughout the broadcast. The same is true across motorsport, basketball, American football and countless other sports.
There is therefore nothing particularly strange about seeing those brands reproduced inside a sports game. If EA SPORTS FC 27 features genuine companies on the advertising hoardings around a virtual stadium, it is essentially replicating something that already exists in the real world. The technology simply allows those adverts to potentially become dynamic, changing according to campaigns, regions or even the time of year.
Open-world games present an even broader opportunity.
A game such as GTA VI is designed around recreating a functioning modern city. In the real world, cities are full of advertising. Billboards, bus stops, digital screens, shop fronts and roadside signs are all competing for our attention. Bringing real advertising into those spaces could therefore be more than a commercial opportunity; it could become another tool for creating believable environments.
There is, however, an important distinction between using advertising to populate a virtual world and using the virtual world simply as an advertising platform. The former can potentially enhance the environment. The latter risks making the player feel as though they are being sold to.
One of the more interesting examples of where this could go is the collaboration between Playground Games and 7-Eleven for Forza Horizon 6.
The partnership is expected to bring 7-Eleven-themed content to the game, including an Evolving World experience and EventLab content. On paper, it's a commercial partnership between a game developer and a global brand. But the reason it is interesting is that the brand actually makes sense within the game.
Forza Horizon 6 is set in Japan, where convenience stores are an established part of everyday life. A 7-Eleven location therefore doesn't feel completely alien to the environment. More importantly, Playground Games isn't simply treating the partnership as an opportunity to display a logo. The collaboration is being used to create content within the game itself.
That distinction could prove important as advertising develops.
There is a world of difference between a publisher saying, "We'll put your logo on a billboard," and a brand working with a developer to create something that players can actually interact with. The first is traditional advertising translated into a game. The second is closer to a collaboration.
And collaborations could be where gaming advertising becomes genuinely interesting.
A car manufacturer could launch a new vehicle in a racing game alongside its real-world launch. A sportswear company could introduce its latest football boot into EA SPORTS FC. A film studio could work with a developer on a limited-time event. A food or drinks brand could sponsor a tournament or create a challenge that exists both inside and outside the game.
Done properly, these partnerships could offer players something rather than simply asking them to look at something.
That doesn't mean gamers will automatically welcome them.
The biggest challenge for publishers is trust. Players have already seen games increasingly designed around monetisation, and there is a legitimate concern that advertising could simply become another layer added to an already expensive hobby.
The reaction will also depend heavily on the type of game. Advertising in a free-to-play title may be perceived differently from advertising in a premium single-player game. A dynamic billboard in a football stadium is likely to feel very different from an advert appearing during a story mission. A branded event that players can choose to participate in is different again.
Context matters.
There is also the question of control. If advertising becomes dynamic, developers and publishers could potentially change what appears inside a game without requiring the player to download a major update. That could create a constantly changing environment, but it also raises questions about how long advertising should remain in a game and whether players should have the ability to opt out.
The technology could eventually make virtual advertising considerably more sophisticated than anything we've seen before. A billboard in a game could potentially display different campaigns depending on where the player is located. Advertisers could run campaigns for a limited period, just as they do in the real world. Brands could launch products simultaneously in physical and digital spaces.
For a publisher, that represents an attractive commercial opportunity. For advertisers, it provides access to audiences spending significant amounts of time in highly engaging environments. For players, however, the benefit is less obvious unless the advertising brings something of value to the experience.
That is ultimately where I think the industry will have to find its balance.
Gaming isn't television. Players aren't simply sitting back and watching content. They are interacting with it, spending hours inside these worlds and building an attachment to the characters, environments and experiences developers have created.
That makes advertising potentially more powerful, but it also makes getting it wrong considerably more damaging.
If publishers start interrupting gameplay with adverts, filling menus with promotions and turning every available surface into a commercial opportunity, the backlash is almost inevitable. But if advertising is limited to places where it naturally belongs, particularly when it supports interesting collaborations or helps reduce the cost of accessing games, the conversation becomes considerably more complicated.
Perhaps the future isn't really about putting advertising into games at all.
Perhaps it's about making brands part of games.
The Forza Horizon 6 and 7-Eleven collaboration is an interesting glimpse of that possibility. EA's plans for dynamic advertising point towards another. Microsoft's ad-supported streaming experiments represent yet another model.
They are all different approaches to the same underlying question: how can the enormous commercial value of gaming be used without undermining why people play in the first place?
There probably isn't going to be one answer. Some gamers will happily accept advertising if it means cheaper access to games. Others will prefer to pay more for an advertising-free experience. Some will see a real-world billboard in GTA VI as another layer of realism, while others will see it as an intrusion into a fictional world.
What seems increasingly certain is that advertising is going to become part of the gaming conversation.
The industry now has an opportunity to decide what that looks like.
It can treat games as another screen on which to display adverts, or it can recognise that games are interactive worlds where advertising needs to be handled very differently.
If it chooses the latter, advertising might not be the unwelcome intrusion many gamers fear.
It could simply become another part of the world we play in.
