Mobile gaming has changed the way in which consumers play. Indeed, it has opened the most the market to the most casual of gamers. Consoles have struggled to compete in the face of mobile devices offering handheld gaming on the move. However, the major console brands are pushing back in terms of trying to engage with customers.
GamesBeat and iSpot.tv have collaborated to show how gaming brands are spending money on advertising. The big take away from the data is that the console giants are vastly outspending mobile developers.
Through the month of December, gaming brands spent an estimated $85.8 million in total. Interestingly, this is a decrease from the $101.8 million spent in November. During the penultimate month of the year, gaming brands were pushing their advertising for Christmas, while Thanksgiving also fell that month.
Heading the list as the company that spent the most on advertising is Microsoft. The Xbox brand spent 36.5 percent of the industry’s entire advertising spend. That equated to $31.4 million spent over 14 TV spots which ran a total of 3,807 times during December.
Xbox and PlayStation Dominance
In terms of generating impressions, Microsoft’s blitz seems to have paid off. The company’s ads gathered 1.2 billion TV ad impressions. Xbox was targeting a clear demographic, trying to appeal to younger males with ads during sports programming. Microsoft spent the most money ($7.1 million) on the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray ad.
Console sales market leader Sony was second with ads for the PlayStation 4. The company accounted for 21.8 percent of the total ad spend through the industry. Sony spent $18.7 million in total for nine sports that ran 2,720 times for 998.8 million TV impressions.
In total through December, 34 brands (including Nintendo in third and King in fourth) ran 106 ads that were played 23,591 times and grabbed nearly 5 billion impressions.
