The Week Before E3: Are Game Companies Missing the Boat on Search?
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Written By Reprise Media | May 5, 2006 | Share This
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It’s the biggest three days of the year for the video game industry: the E3 Expo 2006, held in Los Angeles next Wednesday through Friday. Featuring new game titles, new game consoles, and women clad in weird, vaguely futuristic costumes, E3 is a magnet for the largely young, largely male and largely online. You would think that game companies would be clamoring for attention every time someone entered “e3″ - or some permutation thereof - into a search engine.
Which is why we’re a little surprised that no game developer seems to be making so much as a peep on the engines. Enter such terms as “e3″, “e3 2006″, or “electronic entertainment expo” into any of the top four search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN or Ask) and the closest you’ll see to a game company in a paid search listing is Gametap.com, an online gaming site that carries a large number of classic arcade titles from bygone eras - 1942 and Pac-Man feature in their “10 most played.”
Who else? Plenty of firms with close ties to the gaming industry (just not the game makers themselves). There are E3-related promotions for IGN on Google (”Special e3 Pricing” for their IGN Insider subscription service) and Verizon on MSN (they’re pushing a free week of Xbox Live). You’ll find Gametrailers.com, a site that features video promos for games, and even The Zerk, which manufactures game lounges - in case you’re wondering, those are chairs that you sit in just to play video games. And yet, nothing from the likes of EA, and Nintendo’s mum.
You’ll even see ads for other conventions, from the somewhat-related (the C3 Expo, for IT professionals) to the not-really-related-at-all (the Multicultural Media Expo - held three months ago).
With so many of the game industry’s products internet-reliant (and so many of their customers just about embedded in various online activities), why are game makers so reluctant to engage in paid search? Maybe they figure that gamers are so plugged in to myriad online communities, close to the front lines of rumors and word-of-mouth, that ads on search engines would be redundant. Whatever the case, we think they’re ignoring a large, lucrative market of more casual video game fans.
Topics: Featured Item, SEM: Paid Search |