Augmented reality continues to be a hot trend in the gaming and general tech spaces, particularly ever since location-based hit Pokemon Go landed on smartphones two years ago.
Things are getting more exciting with the launches of Ludia’s Jurassic World Alive, Next Games’ The Walking Dead: Our World and Niantic’s upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
All these games are free and make their money from in-app purchases.
But there’s another hot industry trend that’s yet to really meet AR gaming: advertising. In-game ads are becoming more lucrative and companies like publisher Voodoo are building entire businesses on the model.
Virtually real
Stockholm-based company Adverty thinks there’s an opportunity for ads in AR games and apps, and has created its own augmented reality advertising platform.
Launched in May, Adverty’s platform is free to use and available to developers around the world. It comes in the form of a lightweight SDK that Unity devs can integrate what it claims are non-intrusive ads into their app (Unreal Engine support is coming in 2019).
Ad units can be dragged and dropped easily into the experience, and once an ad has been served, Adverty pays a monthly revenue share to the publisher.
The ad platform works by displaying ads in on the virtual layer of the real world. Much like you’ll see various posters and billboards in real life, Adverty is bringing that model to AR.
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Adverty used in Bica Studios’ PuzzlAR
”AR advertising is a new addition to mobile advertising and several ad tech companies and social platforms such as Snapchat are now offering this new format,” says Adverty CEO Niklas Bakos.
“Most services out there are built for traditional (non-AR) apps (or mobile web sites) and initiate the AR-ad from the in-app menus (before or after gameplay), which require the end user to allow access to the camera before loading the ad.
“The Adverty AR platform on the other hand is built for AR games and apps and allows for a seamless coexistence of AR ads within the actual AR experience.”
A key concern with ads in the AR space is just how intrusive they’ll be and whether they’ll take users out of the experience or activate accidentally.
Bakos says Adverty has already planned for this. One option open to developers is setting whether the ad units are clickable or not.
“Clickable ads allow for rewarded videos with app-installs to be added to the ad experience once an ad unit is interacted with, which ideally could increase the eCPM and ad revenue for the publisher,” says Bakos.
“Developers are also given full freedom to setup how ads are activated. For instance they could allow a finger tap to initiate an ad but any in-game activities such as shooting an arrow on the ad wouldn’t allow players to trigger it, or vice versa.
“The non-clickable ad units only display brand advertising campaigns and are very useful in scenarios where ad intrusion would kill the experience, such as in real-time multiplayer games or endless runners.”
You can see an example of the ad in action in the video below, which features Bica Studios’ PuzzlAR and the inclusion of ads from Adverty’s platform.
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Source: Pocket Gamer.biz