I am considering making money from an iPhone game using iAd or AdMob in-game advertising, particularly as I am left with a part of the screen not used for gameplay.
Are there any similar options for in-game advertising on PC / Mac? If so, this would seem to be the best way to monetize a game on those platforms.
nope, no such platforms for desktops, likely cause there is no reasonable way to bind it to interests etc of users unlike on the web
I know there’s flash games that have ads during loading screens, maybe there’s a way to do something similar with unity.
they are webbased though too aren’t they or they are on a portal and advertise something from the portal.
thats a pretty specific case over free form advertisement in the “iphone style”
The original poster never mentioned if it was going to be a web game or a download.
make a splashscreen, that when clicked, takes you to a website
assumed it was a standalone app as he mentioned to be pc / mac platform, not web, so its naturally possible that it is web but even then: the amount of web ad systems you can easily integrate is restricted. also there you wouldn’t integrate it with the game likely but with the surrounding page. less problems and far more possibilities as it does not need to be an image thats WWW accessable
Original poster here. I am considering web, as well as standalone, but was mostly posting about downloaded versions, but all comments welcome.
I noticed that the standalone settings in Unity are at a higher resolution than web, and would like to show off my game to the best setting, but am also just considering having an advert next to the game on a web version.
I haven’t really looked at website advertising before. I’m really put off by animated adverts. Can you control if you have animated adverts, or just static? Who are the best advert providers to deal with?
no normally you can’t control what kind of advert you get but that might depend on the system. Animated ones likely just result in some better cash for ya.
Google Adsense does not have animated ones as far as I recall.
As far as web banner ads, you can set adbrite up to require that you approve the ad, but it can take some time to build up a large amount of different ads, and they aren’t based on the webpage at all.
Google’s adsense can be set to only be text ads, which avoids bright colors and animations all together.
As a standalone, you would also have to worry about internet connectivity assuming of course that the ads are served from it.