Distribution and Marketing - Game Design Essentials - page 243

site. Cheerios, made by General Mills, has a few on its site, including
Honey Defender ( www.honeydefender.com ) and Buzz's Honey Bust .
A game may be made and then marketed on more traditional game
sites; however, the theme of the game is directly related to the mes-
sage or product it was intended for. A good example is America's Army ,
which was designed to increase recruitment www.americasarmy.co m/ ).
The third type involves in-game advertising, or product placement,
discussed more in the next section.
Companies such as Advergames ( www.advergames.com ) and Giant Bomb
( www.giantbomb.com ) offer a huge assortment of advergames you can study
and play. Raw Computing ( www.rawcomputing.co.uk/advergames.html ) offers
instructions on how to create an advergame; check them out to see how simple
these games are to make.
Many third-party, independent game developers are routinely hired to produce
advergames for their clients for a variety of platforms. One such company is
Skyworks ( www.skyworks.com ). Sk yworks specializes in creating advergames for
the iPhone and iPad for clients including Sony, Ford, and ESPN. Star Mountain
Studios has a fun Flash-based advergame called Genie Joe and the Axeman ,
made with Joe Perry from Aerosmith, which promotes Perry's hot-sauce com-
pany ( www.starmountainstudios.com/FreeGames/GJandA.html ).
Another company that specializes in making advergames is Game and Buzz
Factory ( www.game-buzz-factory.com/games.php ). Th e company's products are
playable on many platforms in a wide variety of advergame categories, including
sweepstakes and point-of-sale games.
Ads may be shown to gamers at different places in a game. Any time an ad
appears in a game, it's known as an in-game ad . Ads can affect the flow of game-
play, so it's important for designers to understand where an ad may appear:
pregame ads are shown just before the game loads, postgame ads run after the
game ends, and interstitial ads can pop up at any point during regular gameplay.
sponsorship
This type of advertising allows a sponsor to invest dollars in the development or
production of a game, or sponsor an event related to the game in exchange for
owning a substantial amount (even 100 percent) of the territory in and around
the game. Owning the territory means that no other advertisers can use the
project for advertising unless authorized by the sponsor.