PC Games Arrive on Madison Avenue

If you're like me, you're starting to see advertising for PC titles break into the mainstream. Ads for PC games are creeping from hard-core gaming venues to prime time TV and general interest magazines.

The evidence is stacking up like planes over La Guardia. GT Interactive has just begun a US$10 million advertising campaign to promote Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. Eidos is spending around $5 million to promote Fighting Force, Tomb Raider II, and Deathtrap Dungeon.

And Sega Entertainment just announced plans to partner with Hershey's, Compaq computers, and the March of Dimes to tout a number of its PC titles - to say nothing of the company's $25 million Hard Stuff campaign it announced today that will tout both console and PC titles via a blitz of ads that break on MTV beginning Oct. 6.

Computer games are entering the world of mass-marketing and big-buck advertising, just like movies and blue jeans and perfume and milk.

But appearances can be deceiving. The increased attention (and budgets) PC titles are coming in for flow directly from the proven success their console brethren have enjoyed.

"We don't typically do a mass push for PC titles," says Paul Baldwin, vice president of marketing for Eidos Interactive. "You've got 30- to 40-million PCs in the home, but only about 1.5 million people play games on those PCs and are hard-core gamers. For platforms like the Nintendo 64 or the PlayStation, you've got an installed base of 6, 7, 8 million - the PlayStation will have an installed base of 8.5 million by Christmas. And when you get to that level, that's when you can make your mark with mass advertising.

"The computer-gaming market is also hard to target because there are so many niche markets there - strategy games, action games, role-playing, sims," Baldwin says. "But the console market was built on action and sports titles. It's a more mainstream market and easier to market to."

Industry analyst David Cole of DFC Intelligence says it's a slippery slope that should be approached with caution, and selectivity. "You can't do this with every product...with Tomb Raider you've got a mainstream , but advertisers have to be very careful how they go about ."

Two of the titles Eidos is touting in its You've Been Warned advertising campaign happen to be cross-platform titles. Tomb Raider II and Deathtrap Dungeon will be released simultaneously as PC and PlayStation titles - which means the PC titles get a convenient coincidental marketing push along with their console brothers.

"Tomb Raider was really our first title where there was some overlap between the PC and the PlayStation title - the gameplay was exactly the same," Baldwin says. "It's a rare game that works well across different platforms."

But cross-platform development is happening more and more often, with more and more titles. And so, more PC titles are tagging along for a marketing ride with their PlayStation or Saturn counterparts.

But at least one company thinks that PC titles have come into their own, that it's time to give PC titles a mass-market push. That company, surprisingly, is Sega Entertainment, which can capitalize on the awareness that the Sega brand already has in the mainstream market, thanks to its console success.

And most of its PC titles were originally console titles.

Jill Baff, director of marketing for Sega Entertainment, is quick to point out that the Sega PC ports have PC-specific features such as network play, but the success of PC titles like Virtua Fighter and Sonic 3D Blast is going to owe a lot to the success of their console likenesses.

Baff asserts that "PC gaming is now a mass-market product category," but her company has still opted for cooperative ventures rather than mass-market pushes as a way to extend its advertising dollars.

Buyers of Hershey's six-packs can now send in a coupon for a Sega CD sampler; participants in the March of Dimes' Rebel with a Cause motorcycle race will receive coupons for free copies of Daytona USA Deluxe; and Compaq Presario buyers will receive coupons for $10 off on each of five Sega PC titles. All of which is a venture into the mass market, but hardly the type of high-profile in-your-face Sega ads that you see on MTV.

When it comes to pure PC titles getting the high-profile treatment, it's hard to come up with a qualifier. Origin did a TV advertising campaign when its title Wing Commander III came out, but that was of a very short duration and only in a few markets.

There are those ubiquitous Final Fantasy VII ads - but (for the time being) that's a PlayStation title.

GT may be spending $10 million on Abe's Oddysee, but Sony is pouring $100 million into a PlayStation marketing campaign.

So maybe its just the fact that the current crop of console machines has gotten into the hands of enough gamers that companies once again think it worthwhile to give a mass-market push to their console titles.

And PC titles are just along for the ride.