Persuasive Games: Promogames, Another Kind of Advertising Game - Ian Bogost
More than an Advergame Of course, just because Burger King critiques advergames does not automatically distance their recent titles from the form at large. Who could deny the fact that the mere representation of Burger King mascots—not to mention the flotilla of BK food products the player serves in Sneak King—are undeniably advertisements for Burger King? Yet, these three games are clearly not just advergames; that is, there is something that separates Pocket Bike Racer from the ubiquitous branded web game. One difference is the platform on which the games are played. In-game placements and advertisements have certainly graced the Xbox 360 (perhaps the best known is Cadillac’s Xbox Live delivery of a free content pack of vehicles into Microsoft’s Project Gotham Racing), but the Burger King games are the first titles developed from the ground up for that platform as advertisement3. In part, this is made possible by the technical and commercial evolution of the video game industry. Blitz Games was able to create, test, and release three games for both Xbox consoles in less than a year thanks to a proprietary cross-platform engine and toolkit the studio uses for all its titles. And Burger King was able to license the games thanks to high-level negotiations with Microsoft executives. But more sophisticated technology and business acumen still fails to explain why an advertising game released on Xbox 360 suggests a significantly different strategy for game-based advertising. As it happens, Xbox 360 players correspond directly to the young adult demographic that Burger King hopes to lure with its irreverent King and Subservient Chicken advertising. In marketing terms, these are the consumers whom television has lost, who have become cynical toward traditional advertising. They are also the consumers who might empathize most with Burger King’s promise of an edgy alternative to the cloying pretense of Ronald McDonald and the humdrum promise of “I’m lovin’ it.” When we look at the Burger King Xbox games in this light, the content of the games becomes much less important than their method of delivery. Burger King used these games as a lure to draw Xbox owners into their stores to buy a Value Meal. This and this alone was the primary goal of the games. And such a strategy itself is nothing new. It is, in fact, the same strategy fast food companies use in their kid’s meals every week: lure kids (and thereby families) to take a meal at their franchise in a world where fast food joints grace every corner. In the world of marketing, this strategy is called promotion. Promotions offer an incentive to patronize a vendor, which may have little or nothing to do with the business’s products and services. Sweepstakes and contests are a kind of promotion, as are giveaways like kid’s meal toys. In the case of the Burger King Xbox games, the downright cheap cost per game further accentuates the promotion’s power: would be burger lovers who already own an Xbox 360 proved more than willing to fork over a paltry $4 for a videogame when the going rate for next-gen titles easily reaches fifteen times that price. According to Burger King, they’ve sold 2 million copies of the game as of December 20, 20064. Even if manufacturing costs, promotional advertising, Microsoft’s licensing share and Blitz’s royalty consume much or all of that figure, Burger King likely has recovered the cost of the promotion before accounting for actual food sales — a rare state of affairs in traditional advertising indeed. Promogames We use the name advergames to describe video games whose primary purpose is to promote a company’s brand, products, or services through gameplay. And by those standards, Burger King’s Xbox games indeed might not be advergames (they do promote the brand and the products, but not as their primary purpose). I suggest a new way to understand this intersection of advertising and videogames. I give the name promogames to video games whose primary purpose is to promote the purchase of a product or service secondary or incidental to the game itself. These Burger King games work by giving gamers a reason to buy Burger King hamburgers, not by telling gamers why they should buy those burgers over other burgers, or over fried chicken. While advergames promote the company, promogames offer an incentive to consume the company’s goods independent of the game’s representational properties. We can imagine a variety of possible promogames, some with stronger advertising aspects, like these Burger King Xbox games, and others with weaker advertising features. For example, consider a hypothetical special edition, level, or episode of a popular original title like Halo or Half-Life given away with a minimum purchase. Promogames would seem to offer particular opportunity for companies who think their target markets intersect with particular segments of the video game playing market. 3 See http://www.motortrend.com/features/auto_news/2006/112_news060613_cadillac_project_gotham_racing_3 4 http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12187/
|
