Home vs. Live: Who Offers Brands the Best Opportunity?

With the launch of Home, now both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 have an arena for brand marketers to reach gamers independent of in-game advertising or integration opportunities. Already, brands are setting up virtual stores and events in the Playstation Home environment, and the new update of the Xbox Live "Experience" has made the XBL environment more marketer-friendly, with the advent of premium themes and branded destinations.

When it comes to reaching gamers, the XBL environment is in most cases the better choice for brand marketers. Although in both environments users generally have to seek out branded content, offerings available on XBL allow brands to take over a user's interface without disrupting the user experience, and without competing with the actual games for users' time and attention.

The branded theme, gamers pics and destination page Sprite put together for this year's Sprite Slam Dunk Competition is a great example. Once users apply the branded theme, they (and any friends they invite over to play) are exposed to the brand every time they power up their 360. In contrast, the branded experiences on Home's Red Bull Air Race, for example, while potentially more engaging puts the brand in direct competition for gamers' time with full-length PS3 games, which is a difficult fight to win.

Home's problematic user experience has been a major challenge for Sony so far. The online community has been enormously critical of the initial launch. Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins has suggested that users would "get the sense that this is a place in which no interesting thing could ever happen," and that's a relatively restrained example of the gamer-rage expressed over its launch.

For marketers who want to get involved in games, user experience is critical. You can't create an entertaining and worthwhile branded destination inside an experience that's fundamentally broken, as many users suggest Playstation Home is... For these reasons, I think Microsoft is definitely winning the brand war right now!