Between Beats: Linking Player Engagement to Advertisement Frequency and Intrusiveness

Abstract

Mobile phones are a popular platform for gaming in addition to being the most ubiquitous one. Monetization of free to play games with embedded and interstitial advertisements is one of the main sources of income for mobile game creators. We used a constructive approach in this study. A mobile game developed during the study, Between Beats, was used to survey the influence of interstitial advertisement on selected aspects of player experience. The study was conducted by deploying the game to Google Play and guiding the players, after gameplay, to an online survey. The survey was answered by 51 participants who were divided randomly into four groups based on how much they were subjected to interstitial or rewarded advertisements while playing. Our results show that embedding rewarded advertisements to a situation where there already is interstitial advertisements, resulted in reduction of perceived advertisement intrusiveness and increase in advertisements viewed. Player engagement remained constant in all groups. Our findings complement earlier findings on the use of rewarded advertisements in mobile games.