The other day I was playing BitCoin Billionaire , an idle game on my phone, and I took notice of the interesting way that it handled advertisements. Specifically, it had none. I was able to play the whole game without watching any advertisements at all.
That is, unless I wanted to. Every so often I would get offers to experience a short advertisement, in exchange for some in-game currency. Watch a video, get some currency. Turn on banner ads for a while, get some currency. Basically I could choose exactly the amount of time I wanted to spend on watching advertisements and in exchange I would get some sort of in-game boost. When I had patience for the ads, I would simply watch them all the time to get as much in-game currency as possible. When I didn’t, I skipped them and just kept on playing.
None of this really mattered, however, because I was playing an idle game. The whole point of the game was to watch numbers go up so you can spend those numbers on watching more numbers go up quicker. But what if we applied this formula to other games?
Imagine if you were playing Call of Duty , and you were just so close to getting your next rank up to get the gun you really wanted. You could grind out another match, but you’ve already spent far too much time playing. The game then asks you if you want a 2000 XP bonus for watching the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer. Of course you’d say yes! You manage to get what you want, and for that matter the advertisers get what they want. At the same time, you also manage to give the Call of Duty team extra advertising dollars that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
For Call of Duty , this may seem excessive. Activision doesn’t need any extra monetary help. But what about indie games? What about games that come from tiny studios with little budget? Ongoing advertising dollars like this could allow them to continue supporting a game when they couldn’t otherwise, and all you would have to do is watch an ad now and again.
The real trick here is that the advertisements aren’t being forced on you. They are, instead, totally optional. Imagine if you were able to turn on ads and get small bonuses, like 1.2-1.5 XP. You can put them wherever you want on your screen, making then non-intrusive, and can turn them off whenever you want. The base game is always ad-free, which is what a lot of people want.
What do you think? Could voluntary ads make games better? Would you turn on ads to get an XP boost? Let us know in the comments.