Massive Incorporated

» see massiveincorporated.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Adweek broke it on 7 October 2010, sourced to people close to the company, saying Microsoft would shutter Massive within weeks. Microsoft confirmed on 25 October. Nobody wrote down a last day of operation, and the sources disagree about which end was meant: the October reporting points at the following few weeks, while Wikipedia has the company closing at the end of 2010. October 2010 is the available precision, and that is where the stone goes.

What Massive sold was advertising inside video games that could be changed after the game shipped. Billboards, posters, soft-drink cans, pizza boxes, images on in-game television screens, all served over the network and swapped out on a schedule, so an advertiser could run one creative in March and a different one in April. Mitch Davis made the comparison to static product placement himself, where the lead time ran twelve to twenty-four months and nobody guaranteed reach. The underlying technology, he told MediaPost in 2004, came out of Acclaim Entertainment. That inheritance is why it ran on PC and console alike, and why it worked offline.

The cafe years in Turkey, 2002 to 2005, line up with this company almost exactly, and the games in those rooms were the games on Massive's list. Need for Speed and Rainbow Six were what the machines ran when they were not running Counter-Strike. Whatever was on the billboards in those rooms, it was not coming from Massive. The model needed the title to fetch creative over the network at some point and keep doing it, and a cafe PC with an installed copy nobody was ever going to update is precisely the machine that pipeline did not reach. There is a reason the inventory was sold against American and Western European numbers.

Mitchell Davis, an Australian who had run Metis Technologies and done a stint as a senior vice president at Encyclopaedia Britannica, started the company in Manhattan in 2002. It launched publicly on 18 October 2004 with more than fifteen titles and RealNetworks as the first advertiser, claiming a weekly reach of close to two million young men. Funding ran $5.5 million that July led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham, then $10 million in January 2005 led by NeoCarta. Microsoft announced the acquisition on 4 May 2006 and said financial details were not disclosed. They never were. The $200 to $400 million range everybody repeats traces to press reporting, not to Microsoft.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what counted as an impression ~

Massive had to invent a measurement model, and the one it arrived at is the detail to keep. Ads were sold in fifteen-second increments and fifteen seconds was the floor: look at the billboard for less than that and it did not count. Buyers could purchase against gross rating points the way they did on television, with guaranteed reach and frequency, and Davis claimed they tracked 100 percent of the buy. For offline play the client kept ad units in memory and worked out where to show them on its own, recording the impression data for later upload. By late 2009 the company's own boilerplate claimed more than 300 blue-chip advertisers and eighty-five independently verified post-campaign studies.

The title list ran long. Need for Speed Carbon, both Rainbow Six Vegas titles, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Guitar Hero III, Saints Row 2, Pro Evolution Soccer 2008, Anarchy Online, City of Heroes, Entropia Universe, and the EA Sports catalog from Madden to NHL. Then in October 2008 the Obama campaign bought roadside billboards reading "Early Voting Has Begun: voteforchange.com" across eighteen games in ten early-voting states, Burnout Paradise among them. EA's director of corporate communications confirmed it on the record and compared it to accepting political advertising in print. No US presidential candidate had ever bought space inside a video game before, and the technology underneath this one was Massive's.

The frontage held up better than the business. Massive's homepage was byte-for-byte identical from 13 September 2008 until 3 March 2011, down to the digest, and the last press release the company ever issued is dated 12 November 2009. The 2004-era version of that page had carried a tagline the later one dropped, in letter-spaced capitals under the wordmark: STOP PLAYING WITH YOURSELF.

~ what microsoft kept ~

Microsoft's statement at the close concedes more than it means to. It remained very committed to games and entertainment advertising, specifically on its owned and operated properties such as Xbox Live and MSN, and it would continue developing and expanding the Massive technology to meet the needs of its first-party gaming advertisers. The owned-and-operated part is the whole sentence. Xbox Live sold its own inventory and kept the revenue; Massive's network had to split with publishers for every title it integrated with. By 2010 EA had taken its in-game advertising in-house, removing a large share of what was left. Before shutting it, Microsoft tried to sell Massive to the rival network Double Fusion for a high six-figure or low seven-figure price, on an asset it had reportedly paid nine figures for. Nobody bought it.

Double Fusion's co-founder Guy Ben-dov gave Digiday the autopsy years later: it was too early, and two companies had exclusively divided a market that was not big enough for either. There was no programmatic buying yet and no dominant engine, so every publisher needed a bespoke integration that the revenue never paid for. The domain was still answering under its own name on 3 March 2011; by 1 April it was returning a 301 to advertising.microsoft.com off an Apache 1.3.33, and the redirect was the last thing it ever did. Davis went on to co-found Brash Entertainment, which raised roughly $150 million and collapsed inside two years. Nicholas Longano, Massive's chief marketing officer, eventually founded an in-game commerce company called Scuti. It is the same idea, twenty years on.

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