It is a pastime people will rarely admit to, but it only takes a few over-the-shoulder glances on the Dubai Metro to see the games industry is booming. Whether it’s a zombie shootout, a whacky race or a brain-training crossword, video games have soared in popularity during recent years, with the industry as a whole raking in $61 billion in revenue last year. Unsurprisingly, a significant chunk of that revenue – 41 per cent – comes from mobile users. To put it in perspective, mobile gaming makes just a billion less than the worldwide movie box office.
Yet despite the massive figures at play, like so many other industries, gaming has faced an uphill struggle to monetise its offering in an era when the internet hands so much to users for free. And following in the footsteps of media outlets and social networks, the industry turned to the most obvious option on the table: advertising. French company Gameloft was one such publisher. It embraced the shift in 2014 by setting up internal agencies with the mission of encouraging brands to buy advertising on their plethora of in-app games. Given the extraordinary smartphone penetration in the Middle East, it was no surprise that one such enterprise found its way to Dubai.
“Two years ago, the gaming industry was challenged as the new trend was to make the games free to download instead of paid-for,” explains Yann Fourneau, the Dubai-based vice president of sales and marketing for South Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Gameloft. “One thing that changed was that suddenly gaming became very popular as you could download them for free. But on the other side, since it was free, a lot less people were willing to pay. So it was becoming clear to us that we had to become more ‘media’. And given the amount of data we have about our users, we thought it could be interesting to create media for advertisers.”
But despite the region’s high smartphone penetration (around 80 per cent in the United Arab Emirates and more than 70 in Saudi Arabia) agencies’ initial uptake of mobile gaming – and the smartphone in general – as an advertising platform was slow, says Fourneau. “The most difficult thing was convincing [the agencies] that mobile advertising could be really interesting compared with the classical models of outdoor, print and television, which are all more accepted in Dubai. They love to have a big banner on Sheikh Zayed Road. But it’s funny when most of that exposure is not normally more than three seconds and they are paying a lot of money for that. But the figures in our system prove to [the agencies] that mobile will be good, and everyone who has tried it has been happy. We have never had a complaint after a campaign, but we have to convince them to budget enough. Mobile is always the smallest part and our job is to convince them that it is the biggest part and will get you better results in terms of engagement and users.”
According to Fourneau, the two biggest elements that single out games as effective advertising platforms are the amount of time users spend on then – anything from a few minutes to an hour – and the levels of data held by the publishers from the basics of age and gender to specific preferences seen through the types of games they are downloading.
But despite the growing length of users’ time spent on mobile games and internet-linked consoles in recent years, gaming is currently far from the top of media budgets, says Daniel Shepherd, associate director of digital planning at PHD UAE.
“Gaming offers the potential to deeply integrate your brand into a high-engagement, high-dwell-time and highly entertaining platform and the tools are there to track this effectively,” he explains. “But there’s a huge dichotomy in the quality of experience on offer. On the one hand, you have utterly immersive, truly native, high-quality placements on console-based games – think sponsoring of perimeter signage in FIFA. However, while these are wonderful, the lead times are so long that they become prohibitive for all but the most forward thinking of clients, who are able to think and plan out of the relentless brief/campaign cycle.
“At the other end of the spectrum there are in-game banners, mostly within poor mobile app experiences that, while quick to execute, are terrible from a user experience perspective and add little to advertisers beyond headline reach. This is also the territory most under threat from the proliferation of ad blocking technologies. I, for one, won’t mourn their loss and welcome the move to better rich-video placements.”
He adds: “It’s a significant platform but when looking at time spent online, it still lags behind mobile behemoths like social. I also think it has a bit of a legacy issue with incentivised advertising, which is, in my view, rightly out of vogue and creates a bad user experience with mobile app banners. A lot of these issue have been addressed, but it’s still not a huge component of media plans.”
On the subject of banners, Fourneau stresses that any such banners only appear on Gameloft’s offerings during a game and while a menu is loading, as “we don’t way to annoy the players – our customers”. But as disdain among consumers towards any kind of in-your-face banner continues to grow – easily tracked through the rise of ad-blocking software – game publishers likewise have had to think more creatively. Alongside the more native ads such as featuring a certain car brand in a race, Gameloft has also developed a system of ‘a game within a game’, which will be sponsored by a brand. One example Fourneau gives is a pizza delivery side quest or mini-game, which is sponsored by Pizza Hut. “It’s 30 or 40 seconds and it’s full engagement because you are playing the game,” he explains. “It’s not classic advertising where it is pushed, but instead you are having fun with the brand and you remember that you had fun with the brand. Here we are just pushing the ‘gamification’ mini-game inside the games to people who already love them.”
But isn’t that still an interruption for a player heavily engrossed in beating that next boss or reaching another level? “The truth is there is always intrusion,” Fourneau admits. “But we know if we put too much advertising then we will kill the other type of business (in-game purchases) and of course we will lose the players.”
And what about the lingering – if perhaps outdated – perception that video game usage is still the domain of 15-year-old boys wearing band T-shirts and sending harassment messages to female players and games journalists during what became known as the #Gamergate controversy? Has this made brands reluctant to see themselves associated with the platform?
According to Shepherd, while the shockwaves of the #Gamergate controversy have not extended as far as the Middle East, there are some stereotyping issues. But he says, rather than a problem, these instead present better targeting opportunities. “While obviously there are going to be certain brands that want to reach teenage boys anyway and it clearly remains a great channel for that audience, I think there’s a growing appreciation that the range of games on offer, particularly snackable smartphone games, appeal to a much larger base,” he explains. “If there’s a stereotype that holds some sway, it’s that the games that involve destroying things, for example Clash of Clans, tend to appeal more to males, while those that require a nurturing instinct, like FarmVille, appeal to females. There are certainly a large number of housewives who are increasingly wiling away their downtime on games like this and Candy Crush, so the stigma about audience isn’t a barrier – it’s actually a targeting opportunity.”
So where does the future lie? There is certainly a flourishing industry in the Middle East, with Abu Dhabi setting itself up as one major regional hub for international companies including Ubisoft and local developers such as Jawaker and Tahadi Games. But the Middle East has a long way to go before reaching anywhere near the heights of some of leading developers, with critics almost universally panning the region’s high profile attempt, Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta by Saudi company Semaphore.
Given the relative infancy of the regional industry and its advertising solutions, marketing directors are more likely to stick with trusted media outlets, this year, Shepherd predicts. “History tells us, unwisely in my opinion, that as soon as ad budgets decrease, marketing directors lay safer and safer bets,” he says. “Game-changing year? Despite my love of a pun, in a conservative climate, I’m going to say no. However, there’s an opportunity for someone with the right brief, the right idea and the right amount of courage to at least run a game-changing campaign and that can only have a positive effect on in-game advertising in the months and years to come.”
And as Fourneau, somewhat philosophically, adds: “Mobile gaming is growing – in fact it is exploding. It’s growing faster than movies, than console TV gaming. Whenever you are waiting, the first thing you check is your mobile and then you play a game. And we have a lot of time to wait in this life.”