EPT
About half a year ago, I posted a thread, asking you guys to help me with my survey about attitudes towards in-game advertising, which I was writing a thesis on. Some of you expressed an interest in reading my conclusions once my research was done, so I promised I would provide you with an English summary (since my thesis was written in Dutch, which is spoken by about twenty people worldwide). It was the least I could do to show my gratitude.
This was back in November. It's April now. I would have written this summary earlier, but I suffer from a rare neurological condition that doctors call “Complete Fucking Laziness”, or CFL. I narrowly made my deadline in mid-December, and my CFL flared up big time right after that. Pretty much stopped doing anything. No more walks, no more parties. Started wearing diapers because the bathroom was too far away. Started wearing napkins because I ran out of diapers. Started pooping on the floor because I ran out of napkins. Hell, I barely even posted anymore.
I'm feeling a little better now though (back up to diapers!), so I figure it's high time to get it crackin'.
I posted my survey on a couple of forums. In about two weeks' time, it attracted 759 respondents. I got about zero response from the other forums, because, as we all know, every website that doesn't have a bunch of horses at the top is completely fucking useless. I would estimate that about 95% of those 759 respondents came from TL. This means I basically wrote a thesis on how TL feels about in-game advertising.
Because this community is obviously skewed towards hardcore gaming, I decided to limit the scope of my research to the attitudes of frequent gamers, a term I arbitrarily defined as “people who play video games at least once a week”. This boiled my sample down to 658 frequent gamers.
Now, let's see the results. (Because this is a summary, I'll be leaving out most of the boring stuff. You'll find a link at the bottom with the full survey data, in case you're that kind of guy.)
A. General Information
- First of all, 636 (96.7%) of you are male, 18 (2.7%) of you are female and 4 (0.6%) of you are apparently genderless. No real shock there, except that I didn't know about Zia having three siblings.
- 103 (15.7%) of you are below 18, 552 (83.9%) of you are between 18 and 34 years old, one (0.2%) of you is between 35 and 49 years old (thanks, Manifesto7?) and two (0.3%) of you are over 50 (probably SonuvBob and R1CH, who are both rumored to be well over a thousand years old).
- Pretty much all of you (94.7%) have been playing video games for at least 5 years. Nerds!
- I also took a look at what kinds of games you guys like. (You were allowed up to three picks, which is why the numbers don't add up.) Check out the pretty graph!
![[image loading]](http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/496/graph1n.png)
I spent like an hour figuring out how to give each bar its own pretty color. - The average score for the statement “Advertising is annoying or obtrusive to me” was 3.33 (SD = 1.11), with a score of 1 meaning complete disagreement, 5 meaning complete agreement and 3 being neutral. So, you sort of dislike advertising in general. Don't we all?
- The average score for the statement “Advertising in movies or TV shows is annoying or obtrusive to me” was 3.59 (SD = 1.17). You hate this more than other kinds of advertisements. You probably thought about all those times where Ash Ketchum's glorious critter catching quest was brutally interrupted by some guy yelling about car insurance. I don't blame you. I, too, wanted to know if Charmander was going to be okay.
B. Research Questions
Research Question 1: What are the attitudes of frequent gamers towards in-game advertising?
Based on prior research by other people who are way better at this than me, I constructed a 6-item scale to express how the good people of TL feel about in-game advertising on a scale from 1 to 5. Turns out you feel 3.12 about it, with a standard deviation of 0.83! It's a slightly positive score, which is kind of funky because we already saw how you're a little negative about advertising in general and advertising in movies or TV shows.
Don't worry though, as far as I can tell from other studies, you're still a fair bit grumpier about it than casual gamers. Wouldn't want to not be elitist.
Research Question 2: Which factors contribute to positive attitudes towards in-game advertising? - Contextuality. You like in-game advertisements better when they make sense in the game's environment. So, you wouldn't like Happy Meal™ ads in an Orc town (because McDonald's wasn't around before Orcs went extinct) but you would like those same ads in BattleToads (because this game obviously hates you and wants you to die).
- Fictitious brands. You prefer “joke” brands (like in the GTA series) over the real deal. This is most likely because fake ads tend to be funny, and they don't make you feel like you're being taken advantage of. There's probably a good incest joke about your uncle and a bunny suit in here somewhere, but I'm getting sort of tired.
Interesting to note here is that casual gamers tend to prefer real ads over fake ads. This is most likely because casual gamers are retarded. - Financial benefits. You're more accepting of in-game advertising if it were to make a game you're interested in ten dollars cheaper, and you're very accepting of it if it were to make it twenty dollars cheaper. You guys are total prostitutes.
Conversely, you're very much against paying extra money to remove in-game advertisements from a game. This is probably because you are poor. - Attitudes towards advertising in general. If you tend to like advertising, you also tend to like in-game advertising. You're consistent. Good for you.
Research Question 3: Which game genres are best suited for in-game advertising, according to frequent gamers?
![[image loading]](http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/4083/graph2g.png)
Not a lot of love for ads in strategy games. I guess we're all still a little traumatized by seeing the Pringles Guy's fat face plastered all over MSL maps a few years ago.
The low score for puzzle games is a little weird, considering that these games are almost always browser games which are usually presented with a bunch of ads to keep them free. Overall, these scores seem to indicate a fairly high degree of acceptance for in-game advertising. Congratulations, you probably gave a random marketer somewhere a boner.
Research Question 4: What differences are there in attitudes towards in-game advertising between frequent gamers who are fans of different genres?
Answer: pretty much none. People who like sports games felt like in-game advertisements made the games feel more realistic and immersive more often than the rest of you. This makes sense because real life sports games always have such ridiculous amounts of advertising that it would just be too weird to not include it in the video games. However, the same difference wasn't found for fans of racing and driving games, while the same reasoning would apply. Thanks for making me look stupid, you jerks.
Research Question 5: What differences are there in attitudes towards in-game advertising between frequent gamers who play on different game platforms?
I don't think anybody is still reading this by now, but this is the last research question so I'm just going to get it out of the way. I found that both console gamers and mobile gamers (people who play on their cellphone, smartphone or handheld console) have significantly more positive attitudes towards in-game advertising than computer gamers. Again, I have no idea why this is, but at least this info is somewhat useful if you're a marketer (which you're not).
And we're through! Whew. If you thought it was boring reading this stuff, you should try writing it. At least it got me to graduate. I'm unemployed now, looking for the one mythical job that doesn't require you to have at least 35 years of prior working experience.
Anyway, I hope this was interesting to some of you. If it wasn't, it's probably better to just lie about it because I have a banhammer and a severe lack of moral fiber.
Hugs and kisses,
CoW
P.S.: Here's that link I promised with the full survey data. Enjoy.
![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/images/usericons/20626.png)
