Downloadable Games? Why No Advertising - the real answer

[gebx]

This is in response to what someone considered news, but most see just as a factless uninformed rant.

http://www.vgchartz.com/news/news.php?id=600

 

An Television campaign in Canada will cost between $500,000 to $1,000,000.  That would include conventional channels such as CTV, Global, CBC, (those are the NBC, ABC, CBS of Canada) and specialty channels like Space, Discovery, Teletoon, G4Tech TV, etc.

You could cut down the cost and buy 100% Specialty channels and bring it down to approx $250,000.  This, on a A1834 demo, would get you about 1,250,000 views from Adults aged between 18 to 34 (perfect demo for gamers).

Now this is just Canada, and you're looking at $250,000 minimum for Specialty only.

The TV advertising industry bases its cost on how many thousands of people watch a show, so if the states has 10x the population of Canada, the cost go up by 10x.

So a TV advertising campaign in the states would cost minimum $2,500,000 just for specialty channels such as Discovery, SciFi Network, G4Tech TV and whatever specialty channel you guys have in the states.

In dollars this won't make sense to any company selling downloadable games. No one would be spending that much money on a $15 game. If they make $8 profit on the game, they would need to sell 300,000 units just to pay off the TV campaign. 

It's dumb, it's doesn't make sense. That's the reason why you'll never see a downloadable game advertised on TV.. and not because of some weird conspiracy theory.