38.7 million players, an average age of 40, half of them women (SELL/Médiamétrie). In-game advertising is the least cluttered mass medium there is. Why your plan ignores it.
On 21 October, SELL, the French video game publishers' association, and Médiamétrie published the 2026 edition of "Les Français et le jeu vidéo", presented at Paris Games Week and reported by Game-Guide and Switch-Actu: 38.7 million French people aged 10 to 80 played a video game this year, 69% of the population. The average player is 40 years old. For the first time, half of all players are women. Average playing time is 5 hours 23 minutes a week, and 48% play every day or almost. Five days later, Minted ran a headline about gaming being "about to live its Netflix revolution", with Microsoft testing an ad-funded cloud gaming tier since the summer. My view: you are looking at a mass medium the size of television, with a tenth of its advertising pressure, and it does not have a single line in your media plan. Not because it does not work. Because nobody has ever sold it to you as a medium.
In-game advertising: the audience nobody looks at
Forget the teenager in his bedroom. SELL's figures describe something else: 35% of players are aged 15 to 34, which means 65% are older than 34 or younger than 15. 42% of 65 to 80-year-olds play. The smartphone is the first device, used by 54% of players, ahead of home consoles at 48% and PCs at 36%, with 2.1 devices per person on average. 42% of players pay for a subscription, 18 euros a month on average, and the yearly game-buying budget is 117 euros. These are people with an income, a household, a shopping basket, who spend more than five hours a week in an environment where your brand is absent.
On acceptance, Alliance Digitale published in February its first reference study on in-game advertising in France, run by Toluna Harris Interactive on 1,018 French people aged 15 to 59, and reported by CB News and The Media Leader. 67% of players say they are open to advertising in games, provided it does not interrupt play (37%) or brings a concrete benefit, an in-game reward (30%). And the figure that should make any media director sit up: 24% of French people think there is too much advertising in video games, against 61% for television and 56% for websites. Vincent Georget of Toluna Harris Interactive sums it up as "a strong paradox: gaming is one of the most engaging media, and also one of the least saturated with advertising". To reach 15 to 24-year-olds, video games are cited on a par with video platforms (36%), behind social networks (59%).
Put that next to what you buy on social. In the OpinionWay survey for Orisha published by CB News on 27 October, 71% of 15 to 25-year-olds find sponsored content too plentiful and 74% are wary of products promoted by influencers. You are paying more and more for a contact in a saturated feed, next to a medium where two thirds of the audience accept advertising and only a quarter find it intrusive. I have written about why I buy creators like media. Video games deserve the same treatment.
Why the market does not buy: 4% of publishers' revenue
Antoine Clairet of Gadsme gives Minted the figure that explains everything: "Advertising still represents only 4% of video game publishers' revenue. To make this model sustainable, we need to move from special operations to regular media buying, like the baguettes that make a bakery's daily takings." Worldwide, WPP Media estimated in December 2025 that gaming advertising spend reached 8.5 billion dollars in 2025, up 29.5%, or 0.7% of global advertising, with 10.7 billion expected in 2026. 3.7 billion players in the world according to Newzoo, 0.7% of budgets. The gap between time spent and money invested is the widest of any medium I know.
The advertisers' objections are well known. In Advertiser Perceptions' Gaming Advertising Report, run in July 2024 among 200 marketing and agency executives, brand safety comes first at 29%, followed by measurement difficulty, lack of scale and the idea that the same consumers can be reached elsewhere, at 26% each. The benefits cited by the same buyers: hard-to-reach audiences for 43%, incremental reach for 38%. In other words, those who stay out fear the context; those who go in find the people they can no longer reach. The context, for its part, can be controlled: in-game sales houses sell billboards on a race track or in a virtual stadium, not comments under a video.
What is not settled is measurement. According to the market review published in October by No Fluff Advisory, the MRC has to date accredited no intrinsic in-game advertising metric, and the IAB measurement framework published in June 2025 is a list of indicators without thresholds. The attention studies come from the sellers: Gameloft for brands, with Mediamento and ActFuture, measures 92.2% visual attention, brand consideration up 29% and ad recall 91% higher than web standards. I take these numbers the way I take Netflix's or radio's: as a signal, not as proof. The proof, I build on my own plan.
Special operations or media: the Fortnite island trap
The cases presented this week at Alliance Digitale's gaming morning, reported by Minted, are fine operations. Since 2022, Orange has placed a phone box in Fortnite, the Safe Zone, which shelters players and raises awareness of cyberbullying: 25 games at the start, hundreds of maps today, more than 18 million interactions claimed, and Roblox in 2026. Carrefour launched a series of Fortnite mini-games on "eating better", 45,000 minutes played in a month, 11 minutes per player on average. Séverine Nubel of Orange explains: "We did not go there to broadcast traditional advertising, but to be truly useful." Mathieu Delcourt of Carrefour talks of "humility" and refuses to "paste classic advertising patterns onto it".
All of that is right, and all of that is out of reach for a scale-up. A Fortnite island with Publicis is a production, months of work, and a measurement in "interactions" and "minutes of experience" that your CFO will never convert into a CAC. It is precisely the "special operations" model that Antoine Clairet says keeps the medium from taking off. What I want to buy is the baguette: a 3D billboard in a racing game, a rewarded video in a mobile game, an audio format in a session, bought on a CPM, programmatically, with a frequency cap, on a target and a territory. Neal Robert, BEM's CEO, announces that his network of more than 1,000 games on Fortnite and Roblox now plugs into AI assistants through MCP, with a media plan and a launch "within 24 hours". The day video games can be bought like display, they enter my media mix simulator as one more line, judged on cost per contact against broadcaster catch-up TV and DOOH.
My rule for in-game advertising
I buy it as a reach medium, never as a special operation: intrinsic formats (billboards, objects) and rewarded video, programmatically, mobile first since it is players' primary device. A CPM negotiated against DOOH and catch-up TV, not against promises of "immersion". Targeting by game genre and country, never by individual profile: Roblox and Microsoft ban personalised advertising to under-18s, and I have no wish to be the first test case. And my own measurement: brand searches and direct traffic in exposed areas against control areas, as for any other screen.
Who should go, and how
Brands whose product already lives in the game. Drinks, snacks, telecoms, payment, insurance, cars, sport: anything that belongs on a trackside billboard or in a stadium. The Essity case showed it on another field: a gamified social campaign produced 14 million impressions and leads at around 6 euros, with first-party data to show for it. The mechanism is the same: the player accepts the brand when it respects the game, and gives something back.
Platforms that recruit players. It is what we are working on right now for a competitive gaming platform: its future users are in games, not on LinkedIn, and sometimes not on Meta either when the category is restricted by the ad platforms. Rewarded video in games of the same genre and intrinsic advertising in the titles the target already plays are the only two levers that speak to a player while they play. And the choice of launch countries can also be read through player density per title.
Brands that have saturated Meta and YouTube. If you spend more than 50,000 euros a month on social and video and your CPMs rise without reach following, video games are, with the living-room screen and DOOH, one of the three places where there are still people you do not reach. 38% of Advertiser Perceptions' buyers go there for that reason. It is the only argument that justifies a new line: incremental reach, measured.
What I tell founders
Over the next twelve months, the market will offer you video games in two forms: the six-figure brand island, sold by a creative agency, and the self-serve campaign driven by an AI assistant, sold by an adtech. Neither is a media plan. A media plan is a target, a reach, a frequency, a cost per contact and a measurement decided beforehand. Video games can fill every one of those boxes today, with a test budget of 10,000 to 20,000 euros, provided you buy them the way you buy a screen, and compare them with the other screens. If you want to know whether your customers play, and what, it is a question we answer in twenty minutes during a free audit. The answer is almost always yes. What remains to be seen is whether you get there before your competitors, or after.
