Paying for advergames
I’d originally intended to write this up for AdJab but, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a better fit over here.
eMarketer has a report on advergames and how effective they can be as marketing tools. Specifically they focus on Burger King’s $3.99 Xbox games featuring their King mascot. The question that they use as the title of the story, “Will Consumers Pay For Advergames,” is easily answered when you look at the world of movie tie-in games. The story makes it sound like Burger King had to adopt such a low price point since they were essentially asking people to buy a glorified commercial. But that’s what gamers have been doing with movie-related titles for years. The games for Superman Returns, the Lord of the Rings series, James Bond and dozens of others may very well be decent games in and of themselves but they’re primarily ways to continue the marketing efforts for the movies they’re tied to.
These games use the same promotional imagery, the same character design and often the same talent as the films, making them de facto marketing components. People routinely pay regular game prices, $40 and more, for these titles without batting an eye. The lower price point from BK was the result of there likely not being much to the game play. If it had been a fully developed game they probably could have charged the same amount as the rest of the Xbox games on the market.
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I am not a hardcore gamer, but it seems to me that BK’s initiative is clearly an advergame when James Bond and Co are more franchise video game hits. If you say that they are marketing material because they are not that great, one could argue the same of some movie sequels… But I would not say that the primary intent is to “continue the marketing efforts for the movies they’re tied to”. Video game publishers spend a lot of mone to acquire the video game rights of a film because it is the insurance to be distributed, get coverage/awareness and sell.
Now the question is: where is the end of marketing, and where does merchanding starts? Another question is: how would people value the product if it was free?