Report: Gaming Publishers Not Getting Money's Worth On Ad Spend, Need To Become More Social

Gaming companies could be wasting their time (and a lot of money) pouring their efforts into the wrong channels. A study released Tuesday indicates that the core gaming audience has a limited tolerance for messages directly from the publishers of games. In fact, the audience is even suspicious of “expert” reviews (such as those on IGN.com and Gamespot), which they perceive as biased because they are highly commercialized and subsidized by advertising from the publisher.

“The heavy gamer really disregarded the majority of publisher advertising and marketing; their preference was to go to the purest sources they could find,” says Ivan Todorov, CEO of Blitz. “One thing that kept coming up in both the study and in the focus group was that they preferred to go to YouTube to watch game-play footage over the marketing or the destination Web sites, or even the content on Gamespot or IGN.”

YouTube was an unmediated source, where other gamers had posted game play, that respondents trusted. “They tend to think that publisher content has been touched up, or sweetened up, in post-production to make the graphics look better,” says Todorov. “They really prefer peer content.” Another outlet that gamers went to for information was Wikipedia — even before they went to the publisher site — or sometimes, elsewhere after, avoiding the publisher site.

Read the entire article at MediPost Publications