Hu says the game, while set in ancient times, was a good fit for a technology product because unlike simple two-dimensional games, it needed to run on a computer with plenty of RAM. The people most likely to be playing it were either going to need more RAM to make that particular game work better, or were likely to be aware of the value of extra RAM for playing games and therefore probable buyers of more in future.
The ads were billboard-style, inserted for a twoweek period into 70 sites within the game,many of them in areas that Hu says players had to visit to play the game properly – places they would receive instructions for their next mission, for example. User-tracking technology was able to monitor how many people’s avatars were exposed to each ad, from which direction, at what distance, and how long they lingered in front. The price of RAM in the real world fluctuates rapidly, and two days into the game, a device that was advertised in the game at Rmb299 was changed dynamically to a special price of Rmb240.
The client reported five times the usual number of calls to its toll-free hotline, which was listed in the in-game ads, during the campaign.
