Gaming brings together 2.7 billion players worldwide and generates 159.3 billion dollars in 2020. It is the Middle East-Africa region that is experiencing the strongest growth. With revenues estimated at 5.4 billion dollars, its market is growing by 14.5% compared to 2019. But it is the Asia-Pacific region that has the most gamers: 1.447 billion.

Revenues generated there amount to $ 78.4 billion. These figures show that since the 1970s, video games have left their economic niche and opened up to the mainstream market.

But what about marketing?

Marketing sees video games as a medium with its ecosystem and its players where all the stakeholders are found: advertising agencies, developers, players, brands, game publishers, communication, and marketing agencies.

The levers are often sponsorship and in-game ads, that is to say, the advertising included in a game and which takes several forms:

• Product placement
• Inserting messages before and after a game
• Integration into the decor.
• Advertising agencies also offer all the elements of programmatic, tracking, and data analysis.

Gaming marketing is beneficial for many parties: Brands find an engaged audience, a large audience, targeted and willing to spend time and money to buy an item or a "skin".

As for publishers, advertising represents for them a source of income that allows them to extend the life of the game and especially to finance its cost which sometimes reaches millions of dollars.

Thus, gaming business models are based on several sources of revenue:

• The paid subscription
• The advertisement
• The purchase of lives, skins, avatars, or other items to advance in the game
• The challenges of gaming marketing for advertisers

For marketers, several issues appear with gaming, here are some of them according to the defined objectives:

1. Notoriety: increased visibility for brands on a well-targeted audience.
2. Conversational: social, which is a major feature of gaming (player communities, forums, discussions during games, social networks, etc.) an opportunity to play more closely.
3. Acquisition: Purchase branded items and play with a brand's skin.
4. Loyalty: rewards and bonuses are part of the loyalty system for brands.
5. Communication: extend its brand territory in the virtual worlds of games.
6. Data Marketing: Data collection and precision of segmentations.