Using adverts as way to fund your game
polycounter lvl 9
Hey, seeing a lot of indie devs going for kickstarters to developp their game, I'm wondering if it woudn't simply be easier for them to fund their game via advertisement inside the game.
I mean they do it in alot fo movies and shows ; plus seeing how that asian guy who made flappy bird could get up to 50 000$ by day just with commercial panels in the game, I'm wondering why aren't there more devs doing this but for bigger projects.
I mean they do it in alot fo movies and shows ; plus seeing how that asian guy who made flappy bird could get up to 50 000$ by day just with commercial panels in the game, I'm wondering why aren't there more devs doing this but for bigger projects.
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point two: with the exception of the VERY FEW games that are as extraordinarily popular as flappy bird or its ilk - most games using adverts as their primary funding method don't see very big returns (not an expert, but this is what i've heard.) It takes a REALLY large volume of players to generate any kind of notable revenue in that way. This doesn't mean that you won't make any money, but it DOES mean that it's far from a guaranteed profit.
I'd know I'd be pissed if I paid $15-60 (general higher-level indie-AAA price) for say, a full-screen singleplayer or multiplayer game and have in-game advertisements for wal-mart or Redbull.
That said, there are more tasteful ways to implement it (Redbull being an actual model of a can in-game at an office desk/product placement that makes sense like in TV shows and movies versus blatant THIS IS SPONSED BY REDBULL LOOK AT ME)
Simcity tried it's hand at that with some of their (paid) expansions like Redcross but I'm not sure how that turned out.
Probably one of the best examples of me having to suffer an in-game ad in a full executable game would be when I used to play Anarchy Online. They'd have billboards scattered throughout the futuristic cities a la Blade Runner that would switch between "fake" advertisements of products from that narrative world and actual advertisements for various brands.
The nice part about it was if you just played for free you'd get both the fake advertisements and real ones on the billboards, but if you actually bought the game you could switch them off so only the made-up advertisements of the setting would play.
Additionally, big-name brands that can actually pay for advertising probably would more likely sue a small game company that needed startup money for using their brand in-game, rather than pay them for it. You'd probably already have to have a pretty-well established studio before being able to make a deal with a brand, which probably means you already have enough money to develop.
+Anything that deals with a specific company, an advertisement, and their brand can be a pain-in-the-ass depending on the company. IE, anything negative at ALL in your game could potentially break the deal. Violence/wrong Color Scheme/story/how long in duration is the ad visible to the player, etc. Just think about how originally ET was supposed to eat M&Ms but the M&M company thought it would be bad marketing to have an alien eat their candy = the survival of Reese's pieces.
That said, I much rather prefer Nuka-Cola in my Fallout setting rather than Coca-Cola.
There is potential money to be made in developing games specifically for companies looking for advertising, but it would probably be less of what you are thinking.
IE the game would revolve around say, everything Coke-a-Cola, like controlling one of the coke-a-cola polar bears and running through the snowy wilderness trying to deliver coke to all of the families of animals. Or, you know, one of those reskins of simple games where the cards just have their brand name plastered all over.
I haven't played it, but Chipolte recently had a game developed specifically for marketing themselves that ties in with their latest big CGI short-film that basically says they're the good guys in fast food.
Companies like that usually have a pretty ridiculous/insane/wtf budget for marketing, hence things like the CGI film.
So yeah, there's that route if you need to pay the bills. Although I'd say that's more "Social Media" than game development.
If you had your choice between taking out a loan and hoping to pay it back with advertisement money (which is based specifically on the amount of people seeing those advertisements), or getting funded by people excited by your project, which would you do?
What's important, almost no one could expect profit before the game was made. At least a long demo was necessary.
gsokol: The better the game is, the more people watch the ads. It also attracts more engaged types of players, who return to it. Even if the sponsors ruled the market, there was a ton of great games with long play times that got sponsored. Not only primitive casual virals with 10 milion views.