Editor’s Pick: Checking out ROG Citadel XV
Product placement in games? It’s more likely than you think
MARKETING THROUGH games has become commonplace; ingame advertising is worth billions of dollars, as sports brands vie to have products featured in games played by millions of fans. But making an entire game from scratch to serve as a digital ad for your product?
These so-called ‘ advergames’ have been around since the 1980s, with the release of Tapper, an arcade game sponsored by brewer Anheuser-Busch to promote their Budweiser product line. Players took control of a bartender tasked with delivering cold glasses of lager to impatient bar patrons.
Food and drink are a common theme in the advergaming world, with brands such as Pepsi, Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, and Chex cereal all involved during the late 90s and early 2000s. Some were fun to play, with Domino’s Yo! Noid platformer for the NES proving popular enough to get a fan-made freeware sequel 27 years later.
Even the US Military wanted in, releasing the America’sArmy series from 2002 to 2007 to boost the recruitment of young people. Making a game isn’t easy and it’s no wonder that advergames declined from 2010, as the process of making games became ever more demanding.
That hasn’t stopped Asus from trying. ROGCitadelXV is a first-person shooter set in a floating cyberpunk city crammed with Republic of Gamers product placement. Asus released the game at the beginning of 2021 and has been steadily expanding it with new content and new product ads. The primary purpose of CitadelXV is to show off all the cool ROG hardware coming soon. You can peruse a virtual display room and check out the latest laptop releases with a 3D viewer. It could have been done in a web browser, but it’s a novel way to browse the products.
The game doesn’t cost a dime, much like how old advergames were free inside cereal boxes, so we didn’t have high expectations. Still, there’s a surprising amount on offer here, from drone-shooting missions to a pinball minigame and DLC that offers parkour assault courses.
Unfortunately, the whole thing runs like ass. Textures look flat, bugs are common, framerates are choppy, and many objects don’t even register bullet impacts. The wall-running and grappling mechanics are fun, but the guns handle like bricks. There are worse ways to explore the new ROG product line, but I came away from Citadel XV feeling underwhelmed, even if the new ROG Flow X16 looks awesome.
Time may prove otherwise, but I don’t think we’ll see other manufacturers jumping on this bandwagon. Advergames should have died out in the early 2000s, along with flared jeans and Coldplay. Still, there’s potential for games to serve a similar purpose; in a world where physical gaming and hardware expos are on the decline, could ‘marketing simulators’ such as the excellent DevolverlandExpo from 2020 be the next frontier?