Advergaming: The interesting fusion of videogames with advertising

Videogames are extremely popular and have now become one of the world's largest entertainment markets, making their reach extremely wide.

Thanks to the attractiveness of videogames and their wide reach, many brands have decided to handle their advertising through this medium. There are a lot of ways to use videogames as an advertising channel for brands, but one of the most interesting is Advergaming.

Advergaming is undoubtedly an ideal tool to encourage engagement and empathy of a brand. Next, it will be explained what advergaming is and its function as an advertising tool.

The concept of advergaming arises from the combination of the terms advertising and gaming, that is, the union of advertising and video games. Just as advertising is present in other entertainment media, such as cinema or television, video games are not left behind. On the contrary, videogames, thanks to their interactive nature, are a very interesting and attractive channel to promote services or products.

Nowadays, where a large part of the people in the world has a smartphone and Internet access, advergaming becomes an extremely powerful tool. In addition, it allows brands to impact in a different and fun way, either through a mobile app or a web browser game.

Advergaming basically consists of videogames developed by a brand with the purpose of serving as an advertising channel for them, or also to transmit a certain message from part of that brand. But, the concept and advantages of advergaming will be better understood with a successful example.

Chipotle's advergame: The Scarecrow

Many believe that advergames always have a modest development and dubious quality. But the videogame “The Scarecrow” proves the opposite. This advergame was developed by the accredited American studio Moonbot Studio and was produced by the Mexican restaurant chain Chipotle. The Scarecrow has won numerous awards, including an Emmy.

Chipotle is a company that has always been very active in the fight for the consumption of healthy food, so this brand decided to bet strongly on this game, whose premise does nothing but transmit the values of the brand itself. In The Scarecrow the players take control of a scarecrow that tries to produce and distribute healthy food among the inhabitants of the City of Abundance. But this is only the beginning. The player's job is also to try to ruin the plans of Crow Foods, a crows-led company that punishes humans, animals and the environment alike. Although this story is not very subtle, it turns out that it conveys its message in a fairly clear and effective way, valuable content in the form of a game.

In short, this demonstrates the great number of purposes that videogames can perform effectively and also the amount of business that can arise through them, from the sale of merchandising to the emergence of different parallel markets around the currencies of various online games, as for example, the case of MMORPG Old School RuneScape, where through various websites like Eldorado.gg, players can buy OSRS gold in exchange for real money.

Returning to advergaming, videogames are an effective advertising channel and many brands are beginning to realize this, so it is expected that advergaming, along with other methods of advertising on videogames, will continue to grow exponentially over time.