Welcome to Now: Free-to-Play Mobile
Game Ads and the Super Bowl
Article
For my
entire life, I’ve had only two reasons to watch the Super Bowl: to know what
people are talking about the next day, and the commercials. The latter has been
my main motivation for viewing. Companies jump at the chance to get their
product seen by the colossal Super Bowl viewership. To fight through all the
noise, companies often put together bombastic spots that are funny, crazy, and
memorable. Buying airtime for their commercials isn’t cheap either, coming in
at roughly $4.5
million for 30 seconds this year. So, you can imagine my shock when I saw
not one, not two, but three
different ads for free-to-play (F2P) mobile games during the football game. These
ads had some serious star power behind them, too. I watched as Liam Neeson
channeled his Taken movie persona in
the Clash of Clans ad, and Kate Upton
clad in fantasy armor telling me about the amazing Game of War. After my initial surprise I began to think: what did
this mean? Is it important? And here we are.
Clash of Clans ad featuring Liam Neeson. The other two are at the end of this article.
I want to
get this off my chest before I get into anything deeper: video game ads are
strange to me. No avoiding it. But they are strange in two very different ways.
First, until very recently, television spots for games were few and far
between. I can count on one hand the number of different game commercials I
remember from my childhood, or at least ones that were solely dedicated to
marketing the game itself. Two in particular stand out: this fantastic
commercial for the original Super Smash
Bros. (below) and for the original Kingdom Hearts. For
the most part, I heard about new games through reading magazines, hearing from
my friends, or seeing what was for purchase at the store. Ads were a rare treat,
often punctuated with years between memorable spots. Nowadays, though, game ads
are everywhere. I saw ads for Destiny
and Grand Theft Auto V during AMC’s The Walking Dead, trailers for The Master Chief Collection playing in
movie theaters before show time, and a countless number of ads shown when watching
Twitch or Youtube. The shift wasn’t gradual either: it seemed that, all of the
sudden, game ads were everywhere. Especially when shown on tv or in theaters,
video game commercials still weird me out. Just a bit.
On the
other hand, video game ads are strange because there are so few of them.
Contradictory? Let me try to explain. For every game ad I see in my normal movie
going or tv viewing, I see easily 5-10 times as many trailers for movies. Video
games are a huge industry. New game
releases are consistently the biggest entertainment product launch of the year.
The most extreme case of this is in 2013 when Grand Theft Auto V launched. In the first three days of its
release, GTA V racked in over $1
billion in sales, making it the largest entertainment launch ever. Compare that to The Avengers, which took 19 days to
reach those sales. GTA V isn’t the
only example, with big franchises like Call
of Duty and Madden putting up
massive units sold through to consumers yearly. Even smaller releases can have
substantial sales. One of my favorites from last year, Transistor, has sold 600K
units in 8 months, which is pretty great. All of this is a long-winded way
of saying that it is strange how “few” game ads there are. Obviously, many of
these games know their core audience does not rely on tv spots to know about
the product, or that ads will sway purchasing decisions. But it surprises me
more of these AAA games do not try to market to general audiences, especially
with how large new games releases already are. Destiny clearly made this push, as I saw their ads everywhere
September-November 2014, but they are the exception, not the rule.
That brings
me to the Super Bowl, and the three ads for F2P games that aired. These ads
speak to the nature of these F2P games themselves, and the industry as a whole.
For free games like Clash of Clans,
users are their number one resource. The games are largely social in nature,
and being able to play with your friends, attack random groups of users, and
post about it on Facebook or Twitter are integral to their success. Their
revenue is solely dependent on the number of active users too. Because the game
is free to download and play (depending on your definition of “play”), many
users never spend any money on the game. According to Supercell the developer
of Clash of Clans, about 90%
of players never spend a dime. Yet, at the moment of writing this article, Clash of Clans is the number one top-grossing
app on the iTunes app store, and Game of
War is #2. In fact, all games in the top 10 grossing apps are “free” to
start. Developers of F2P titles therefore must play a numbers game: the more
total users you have, the more money you are able to make with a 10% total
conversion rate from free to paying users. What better way to grow your user
base than to show it to one of the most viewed television events on the year? The
most shocking thing to me was that these games are so successful that paying for a Super Bowl ad made financial sense.
 |
| Yep, all games there are F2P. The top two had Superbowl ads. |
Marketing to
grow their user base is the biggest part of a F2P game. This, unfortunately, is
one of the reasons games like Clash of
Clans leave a bad taste in my mouth, and the commercials irked me. For the
sake of this article, I’m not trying to argue that F2P mobile games are inherently bad. For what it is worth, I
have heard Clash of Clans is a
relatively competent mobile action strategy game. The issue that arises with
games like these is two fold. First, to make money, pay-to-skip time walls are implemented
to artificially restrict playtime, or paid gameplay boosts help paying users
have an advantage over free users. Second, as evidenced by these Super Bowl
ads, a hefty portion of F2P games’ budget is spent on advertisement. When the
number one goal of these games is to gain more users, spending money to make more
and better content for the games can fall by the wayside. If I had to guess, I
would think that it is more profitable to get new users to pay for the same
content than it is to fund and create new content to charge your old users for.
Again, I can’t speak for these games in particular, but trends like these hold
true when looking at the overall F2P market. A final point of general sourness
about these F2P games and their Super Bowl ads is their deceptive nature. This
is an endemic problem in the games industry. Game advertisements often feature
no gameplay footage whatsoever, featuring flashy and highly polished
pre-rendered sequences “representative” of gameplay. Or, like the route taken
by these F2P Super Bowl ads, say nothing about the game. The Liam Neeson Clash of Clans ad had me smirking, sure,
but it told me nothing about what it is like to play the game. Game of War
is a more egregious example, where the live action sequences (made to look like
what the game play entails), are dramatically different than the game itself. I
will not belabor this too long, as F2P games are certainly not the only guilty
party here, but it did leave a final
bitter note to the already unpleasant taste in my mouth about the whole thing.
These
Superbowl ads are also reflective of the state of the industry as a whole. Besides
blockbuster franchises like Grand Theft
Auto, Madden or Call of Duty, the
tremendous production cost of AAA titles limits revenue for many IPs. Despite
great reviews and tremendous word of mouth, sales of Wolfenstein: The New Order by MachineGames were low. Another
example is SquareEnix, who expressed disappointment over sales of the recent Tomb Raider reboot, despite it selling
millions of copies across PC/PS3/Xbox360. These F2P games are the products that
are proving the most profitable in the current market. I don’t have to look far
for proof of this: let’s just take SquareEnix again. On the AAA front,
SquareEnix has had limited success recently. Tomb Raider sold well, but not to the expected levels, and other
titles like Murdered: Soul Suspect
have similarly underperformed. Yet, despite the dearth of successful releases,
SquareEnix recently announced that its profits
have doubled largely as a result of their recent push to release free mobile
games with paid incentives like Sengoku
IXA and Dragon Quest Monsters Super
Light. Will more game makers and publishing studios, like SquareEnix, move
towards releasing more F2P mobile titles? It’s hard to tell. All I can say for
sure is that it seems to be pretty darn lucrative. And, if this does happen, it
is still too early to tell if development of these titles would impact the
quality or quantity of large console releases. I doubt it, but it certainly
seems like something worth considering.
In the end,
when thinking about the F2P ads during the Super Bowl, I’m left with more
questions than answers. Certainly, they are representative of the primary goal
of these games, to grow their user base. They also represent the significant
market share F2P mobile games occupy. Recent reports show that mobile only
gamers make up as much as 20%
of the market, a number that is no doubt growing. They also hint at the
challenges big-budget AAA games and game makers face, as their profits
generally pale in comparison to these F2P mobile games. And finally, these
commercials may be the harbinger of things to come, as more developers and
publishers (like SquareEnix) emphasize mobile game development, potentially at
the expense of AAA releases. The future is wide open. Without any other great
solutions, the impetuous falls on game makers, journalists, and lowly bloggers
like myself to advocate for the great games that are being released today. I
would love it if mobile gamers knew about some of the truly special titles out
there, like Hearthstone, Monument Valley, Faster than Light (FTL), or Framed.
So check them out, if you have some time. I think you will be happy you did.
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Footnote:
If you’re interested on more discussion of this subject, check out this discussion
thread that popped up on Reddit.
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