Advertisements are the life-blood for many games. It is difficult to attract players if they have to pay upfront. There are many different formats with the three most common being:
- Banner - displays above or below game-play
- Interstitial - displays between game segments
- Reward - Player chooses to see an ad for gain
With an extensive range of networks to choose from:
- AdMob - Google-backed and the most popular
- Chartboost - specifically for games
- Appodeal - Aggregator of many of the others
- AdColony - Yet another contender for best network
- UnityAds - Simplicity to use, aimed at gamers
- and many more
Now you could use an aggregator and manually select the network. May networks provide aggregation. There are some problems with this:
- Dependency - If the aggregator is offline or shut down you will not have any advertisements served.
- Size - An aggregator loads libraries for all the networks it supports. It is a problem for Android with the 64k limit on entry points.
- Versioning - You have to rely on the version of a network API supplied by the aggregator.
- Complexity - The aggregator system to set up priorities on networks can be hard to program and painful to maintain.
- Reliability - Networks cannot always serve an advertisement. It is useful to have more than one source to cover this situation.
- Platforms - Different providers support different platforms, with Android and iOS being the most popular.
Adze provides a decoupled interface to the systems of your choice. If you have more than one source, you can choose different strategies for using them.
Adze also provides a rewarded video prefab that once reskinned can ease the process for you.