There are so many sources which cite that Google is buying in-game advertising network Adscape that its tricky to see where the initial story came from.
But the figure of $23 million is not much more than 10% of what Microsoft paid for market leader Massive last year, a detail attributed to the fact that Google is buying a ready made technology platform, not a market share.
The company doesn’t yet appear to have published any game company wins, but has filed for 15 patents in in-game technology.
The other companies that have been at this for a while, and which have some market share, are DoubleFusion and IGA but they would have been more expensive properties, not that Google really cares about price, when it is buying technology.
Google has perhaps less to win here than Microsoft had when it bought Massive for a figure reported as over $200 million last year, because Microsoft knew it could exploit its own Xbox games with the technology, and Google currently has no games division.
Google, which has to match Microsoft step for step in setting up advertising services, needs to be able to offer clients the technology to chase after a particular demographic of customer regardless of whether they are watching a TV show, playing a game, reading a magazine or browsing the internet, so that it can match Microsoft’s technical Adserver capabilities.
Google has instead been diversifying into newspaper and radio advertising mediation until now, using technology it has developed itself.