Popular MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) game City of Heroes is a game that’s been around for almost 4 years (April 28th 2004). Continual development, and ongoing maintenance of the game are paid for with monthly subscription fees from their user base (~139,000 users as of September 2007). But the team that runs City of Heroes has decided that they want to be more aggressive with their development schedule in order to ensure that they retain their users in the face of other newer, fresher MMOs.

How could they do this? Well, the advantage that they have over many MMOs is that their game is set in a ‘real world’ with roads, buildings, etc, whereas a great deal of their competition is set in fantasy sword and magic settings. Why is this an advantage? Well, with the buildings come billboards, and with the billboards comes an opportunity to sell in game contextual advertising. Take a look at the images below to see how they’re going to do this.

What this does for their advertisers is give them access to a user base that NCSoft (the publishers of City of Heroes) has detailed demographic data for. It’s not unthinkable that at some future point they may even set the ads to display differently to each user based on their demographic information (location, age, gender, etc). Now, this advertising system does have the option for a user to opt out, so it’ll be interesting to see how many people actually do (should they release those figures).

For a marketer, advertising in games such as this give you that captive audience that if you target correctly, can work very nicely for you. Imagine if Blizzard somehow implements this in World of Warcraft - a game with 10 million subscribers…