Asia’s unique and thriving mobile gaming ecosystem brings heightened consumer engagement and specific opportunities for the region’s brand marketers to explore; the latest WARC Guide explains what these are.

In The WARC Guide to marketing in the gaming ecosystem, Tim Lindley, Chief Experience Officer at gaming and esports marketplace Yup.gg, outlines the factors that have led to mobile gaming in Asia Pacific coming to account for about 25% of all global gaming revenue.

Particularly important was the rapid adoption of mobile in Asia, bypassing personal computers and providing millions with their first exposure to gaming.

Mobile gaming has subsequently evolved along a different path; the most popular mobile titles in Asia are not the casual games that climbed the charts in the West, Lindley points out. “Instead, they are highly complex and involved games developed specifically for mobile platforms.”

Some context: Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is a MOBA game (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), and has a reported 75 million active players. The biggest game in the world, League of Legends, is also a MOBA game but designed for PC, and has an estimated 100 million active players.

Add in the fact that mobile games players describe themselves as feeling more engaged and less stressed when playing compared to equivalent time spent using social apps and it’s clear that mobile gaming has the potential to cut through the marketing clutter that plagues many social channels, says Lindley.

Mobile gaming ad formats, for example, “bring a new dynamic to media buys, enabling marketers to reach their audience while directly playing mobile games”.

Players can be rewarded for engagement, rather than just interrupting their gameplay – an approach that has been successfully used by games publishers. And while this has taken the form of a low-funnel conversion tactic (try before you buy), Lindley argues there’s no reason why brand marketers could not deploy these ad formats as a way to get potential customers to spend time with their brand.

“H5 microsites and games have been especially popular in China as a way to build brand experiences within platforms such as WeChat, and now advertising formats within mobile games provide marketers with a scalable canvas to create interactive experiences for their customers.”

For more details of the gaming opportunities that APAC brand marketers can explore, read Tim Lindley’s article in full: The future of gaming is mobile, and in APAC the future is now
WARC subscribers can read the complete WARC Guide to Marketing in the Gaming Ecosystem here.
The WARC Guide is a compilation of fresh new research and expert guidance with WARC’s editorial teams in New York, London, Singapore and Shanghai pulling in the best new thinking globally. It also showcases the best on WARC – case studies, best practice and data sourced from across the platform.

Sourced from WARC