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Infinity kingdom ads2/18/2023 ![]() Throne, meanwhile, nabbed sports stars Fernando Torres, Anderson Silva, Alexander Ovechkin and Tony Parker for its campaign. Megan Fox, best known for Transformers, was the face of Plarium’s 2016 game Stormfall (sort of like Vikings and Throne, but with dragons and magic). The other is a glossy marketing campaign that a triple-A publisher would tip its hat to. ![]() So that’s one side of the advertising for these games. ![]() There is apparently little or no need for the ads to communicate what’s in the actual game they're promoting.Ī sultry American voiceover warns me I need to be over 18 to play Vikings, before I get asked questions about my age, whether I can handle sex and nudity, and whether I’m happy to wait until level 10 "before I see explicit content." I haven’t even started playing, and already I feel as sordid as if I’d spent a speed-fuelled weekend in Magaluf. Either way, advertisers are using sex to sell decidedly unsexy games. When I asked Plarium about the dubious ads, I was told that "we don’t encourage using them, quite the opposite, if and when we identify banner examples such as the ones you enclosed below, we often ban their use." Seeing as I first stumbled upon these ads months ago and they’re still up at the time of writing, it looks to me that they’re not in too much of a rush. These ads aren’t managed by Plarium themselves, but by partners who seem to get paid on a per-click or per-registration basis. The ad for Vikings (which featured a sexy lady) took me through to a screen depicting another woman in a state of semi-undress. I’d speak to some of those people, including the big spenders, but first I needed to get a taste of the games for myself.ĭepending on which ad I clicked, I was taken through to a sign-up page for either Throne or Vikings, two games by an Israeli developer called Plarium. At the center of all this madness is a library of identikit online games fuelled by people forking out hundreds, even thousands, of dollars each month to keep levelling, keep conquering, keep clicking. To learn more, I clicked the faux-Deku tree, jumped into the games and spent some time getting to know the people who play them.īehind that tree lay a world of games driven almost entirely by marketing, filled with sleazy adverts on the one hand and high-budget trailers, blockbuster movie licensing and celebrities on the other. It'd be easy, if these games didn't have enormous audiences and generate huge amounts of revenue. It'd be easy to assume that we've moved beyond the days of late noughties empire-builder/clicker hit Evony, when women with no connection to the game invited players to “Join the Fun”. These are games with advertising so desperate that it'd be easy to assume no one with a sliver of taste plays them.
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