Gaming And Law: What Businesses Need To Know - Part 3: Advertising In The Gaming Sector

• Published date: 21 March 2024
• Law Firm: Norton Rose Fulbright Hong Kong
• Author: Lara White, Miranda Cole and Rosemary Nance

Gaming raises a multitude of legal issues for businesses. In this series of publications, Gaming and law: What businesses need to know, we cover a number of the most topical issues.

Gaming technologies have evolved rapidly in recent years, presenting new ways to engage players through online advertising. Alongside these advances, new legislation and regulatory guidance in the EU and UK creates a complex regulatory environment to navigate when serving ads. In this Part 3, Advertising in the gaming sector, Lara White, Miranda Cole and Rosie Nance consider how businesses can approach online advertising in games and the privacy and transparency factors to be considered in the light of new and existing laws.

Types of online advertising caught by new and existing regulatory requirements

Most privacy and transparency requitements regulate "programmatic" advertising, where cookies and other identification and tracking technologies are used to target advertising campaigns to people (or devices used by people) most likely to buy (based on a profile built using browsing history and other information about the person). This type of advertising depends on building detailed profiles using personal data, so is caught by privacy laws and new transparency requirements. This type of advertising can be displayed as pop-up ads, or on advertising within a game (such as billboards or on cars).

Other types of advertising typically displayed in games include product placement, which does not rely on additional personal data from players, presenting the product in same context to all players. That said, product placement is still subject to certain regulatory requirements.

European privacy legislation

Targeted advertising is subject to specific regulation in jurisdictions including the EU and UK (i.e., the E-Privacy Directive and the GDPR...