Evony, that game that puts horny ads on your Facebook sidebar, just had a Super Bowl commercial

Free-to-play games are always looking for new players, and publishers think the Super Bowl audience is ripe for potential new converts. And that includes one game that is best known for putting half-naked women into web ads.

Evony, an online city-building game, had a commercial during the National Football League’s finals. If Evony sounds familiar to you, you’re probably remembering its series of web ads that heavily relied on female cleavage to get the attention of players.

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It might seem strange for a company to go from advertising games on Facebook with what looks like a Maxim Magazine cover to a $5 million Super Bowl ad, but this is exactly the kind of game that does spend on this kind of marketing campaign.

In the next few months, traditional game publishers are going to release massive blockbusters like Mass Effect: Andromeda, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands, but you will not see commercials for those releases during the Super Bowl. Instead, with the exception of Nintendo’s new Switch gaming console, you’ll only see ads for free-to-play games like Mobile Strike and World of Tanks.

And that’s because acquiring new players is the entirety of the business model for those games. Evony’s publisher knows that for ever new user it acquires, it will make so much money — typically in the $1 to $2 range, on average, over the lifetime of the player’s relationship with that game. But that means, to survive, a game always needs new players, and when the potential new players on Facebook that like to click on pictures of pretty girls dries up, you have to amp up your marketing … and for Evony, that means the Super Bowl.