Premium Games Are Getting More Expensive, And Advertisers See An Opportunity

A watershed moment could be close for advertisers who have long wanted to do more in the gaming channel, as more marketing opportunities arise in premium games.

For one thing, the growth of incrementality-based measurement is a boost to games, where advertisers can often reach people who are otherwise very difficult to reach online (such as ad-blocker users, cord cutters and gamers who spend most of their free time gaming).

Plus, as premium game prices skyrocket – with Microsoft and Nintendo saying they’ll charge $80 for new releases – and paid subscriptions and cloud-based gaming services take off, marketers sense a chance to defray rising costs with ad revenue – perhaps dispelling some doubts about the value of more ads in games.

Major console players Sony and Microsoft are also moving toward an app-store model for gaming, so agencies can port their tried-and-true app store advertising practices over to the console properties.

Finding fandoms

As the in-game advertising channel has matured, it focused on addressing advertiser concerns about media hygiene, said Edward Manning, head of investment at dentsu Gaming.

“We developed a way to measure viewability,” he said. “After that, it was making sure that gaming was part of all the DSPs.”

Today, Manning said, “most of our suppliers are integrated with all the DSPs that we use,” and it’s easier for buyers to match gaming audiences using ad tech. With the data onboarding and integrations in place, he added, the big players on console and PC – particularly Sony and Microsoft – are ready to “start opening those floodgates.”

The dream of advertising programmatically in premium, or so-called AAA games, is close to reality, Manning said. Five years ago, he said, clients were asking if they could get into Roblox, Fortnite or Call of Duty. Nowadays, the answer is increasingly, “Yes.”

But advertisers are really salivating about the opportunity to reach sports fandoms via licensed video games. Sports marketing is a huge budget for many brands, and gaming should be a key extension of those efforts.

For example, the game developer EA Sports is opening up new ways to reach sports fans through its league-licensed gaming properties, including Madden NFL and EA Sports FC. And EA has signaled interest in doing more dynamic in-game advertising.

As those opportunities become accessible, it will be a no-brainer for any brand that sponsors a professional sports league to advertise in that league’s official video game, said David Sable, vice chairman at ad agency Stagwell.

“Like, why aren’t I in this game the same way I am in the stadium?” Sable quipped. Plus, in-game ads give buyers who can’t afford real-world sports sponsorships a cheaper option, he said.

Advertising in a sports video game is an intuitive strategy for many brands that haven’t tried gaming ads, said Steve Bagdasarian, chief commercial officer at measurement platform Comscore. For one thing, sports titles are considered reliably brand safe compared to hit games that are often violent, like “Call of Duty.” And ads in sports games, he said, feel more like “a natural extension of the real world.”

Proving incrementality

Sports video game campaigns aren’t just a way to retarget people who also watch sports on TV, though. The real benefit lies in reaching gamers who can’t be reached elsewhere.

However, while the gaming channel is often said to include incremental consumers who don’t engage with other media channels, it’s been relatively hard for advertisers to prove that hypothesis, dentsu’s Manning said.

But now, measurement partnerships like the one between Comscore and programmatic in-game ad platform Anzu make it easier to compare video games to other media channels, Manning said.

“We can start measuring incremental reach against TV campaigns,” he said. “That’s the same thing we were doing for YouTube 10 years ago to stimulate demand in that direction.”

Regarding Comscore’s data touting incrementality measurements and brand lift for gaming audiences, “no one has been surprised,” Bagdasarian said. But the real trick, he added, has been to “incorporate enough testing data to be able to justify how [gaming] fits into investment strategies for 2026.”

Having that data is “the difference between being cool and worth experimenting with and being part of your monthly activation,” Manning said.

For dentsu’s part, Manning said, “we’re having gaming opportunity meetings and strategic sessions with all of our key accounts.” However, “we’re not yet at a stage where it’s a single-digit portion of every client’s budget.”

To grow those budgets, he said, agencies must prove in-game campaigns can deliver better results than traditional media channels like online display. Which will be a major focus over the next six months at dentsu, he added. “If I could steal 10% of standard display and put it toward in-game, I’d love to.”

Getting creative

With actionable in-game ad performance data in hand, the next big hurdle to in-game ad investment is to figure out which creative approaches work best.

“Everybody generally accepts that there’s a very captive, very transactional audience” in games, Bagdasarian said. “It’s the creative execution that’s the hold up.”

Marketers have a wealth of potential in-game formats to pick from, including static or moving banners, pre-, mid- and post-roll video, pause-screen ads, full-screen takeovers and sponsored in-game assets, such as branded wearables or playable mascots.

As brands experiment with these formats, Bagdasarian said, clear winners should emerge, similar to how streaming TV publishers converged around Roku-esque home-screen ads and pause-screen placements. He said he could see console and PC gaming platforms mimicking popular streaming formats while also taking cues from the more established mobile gaming channel.

The mobile playbook will become even more applicable to console, PC and cloud gaming environments as Sony and Microsoft gravitate toward an app-store model for their game platforms, Manning said.

The idea isn’t exactly new. Microsoft first set consoles’ adoption of the app-store experience in motion with the launch of its Xbox Game Pass in 2017, Manning said. The paid service lets subscribers download games from hundreds of titles, using an interface similar to what you’d see in the Apple App Store.

That experience is prime for more app-store-style ads, he said.

“There’s going to be a generation of kids that grow up with ads in the standard console experience,” Manning said. Within a couple of years, he said, the AAA game developers will all be bidding for that console homepage space.

Plus, as consoles embrace the app-store model, advertisers will bring their mobile best practices to these gaming environments.

If that’s the case, Sable said, advertisers would be wise to copy what’s worked in mobile, like rewarded video formats and home-screen ads, while avoiding what hasn’t worked: interruptive, full-screen takeovers. Ultimately, he said, the biggest returns on in-game campaigns will come once advertisers tailor new creative formats to the unique ways gamers play and build communities around their games.

The value proposition

While creative is still a question mark, brands’ biggest challenge remains how to serve ads in games without turning off gamers.

Fortunately for marketers, the rising costs of premium console games presents an opportunity to prove the value of ad support.

“Game studios are thinking more collectively about an ad-driven model,” Bagdasarian said. “Frankly, I would love to not have to pay full price for my kids to buy a brand-new NBA 2K every single year, because I could buy the ad-supported version at half the cost.”

Plus, the growing popularity of paid subscriptions like Xbox Game Pass and cloud services, which bring console-based games to mobile devices, are also increasing costs for gamers, Manning said.

“The gaming industry is at a bit of a crossroads itself, from a console versus cloud perspective,” he said. But, he added, “all roads lead to advertising being one of the options for paying for games.”

In that sense, the video game affordability crisis couldn’t have better timing as the in-game ad channel looks to prove its worth.

“Too many people are upset about the price of video games,” Manning said. “If advertising can come across as part of the solution, rather than one of the problems, that’s going to be a huge benefit.”