I was pretty surprised today when I stumbled across the above advertisement on a Minecraft blog. I spend a lot of my work day perusing gaming sites, which is why I was shocked that this was the first League of Legends advertisement I’ve seen (on a non-LoL related site).

Online video game advertisement has always been a funny thing to me. Maybe it’s that I’m involved in the industry, or maybe I’m just old enough that I didn’t randomly happen upon games – I researched them and waited anxiously for their release – but I just can’t imagine those ads actually persuading me to try a game.

I want to say that League of Legends is different because it’s free, but free game advertising is usually laughably bad. We’ve all seen ads for Evony online. They’re hilarious. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that those games may have ruined online advertising for the free-to-play model, at least for the immediate future.

Then again, I don’t have millions of people playing the game I created.