Publication Date

7-1-2026

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Doxa Comunicacion

Volume

2026

Issue

43

DOI

10.31921/doxacom.2839

First Page

201

Last Page

223

Abstract

Changes in leisure consumption are causing transformations in the relationships between young people and brands. A reflection of this is found in video games, whose predominant user profile is that of young people between 18 and 30 years old. They invest more and more time in digital universes: they play, socialize and even buy, and income from the video game sector has increased year after year in Spain and in the world, surpassing those generated jointly by cinema and music. A review of previous literature indicates the relevance as an object of study of video games that are used as advertising formats, especially from the user's perspective. However, they are not recent and focus primarily on childhood. Thus, this research is based on the main objective of determining, from a multicultural perspective, the profile of the university student gamer in Spain and Portugal. Two specific purposes are derived from it: to evaluate the user's relationship with the integrated brand and to compare perceptions based on cultural factors. To achieve them, a survey is carried out on 603 university students with variables based on consumption habits, brand identification, advertising memory and resulting relationship with the integrated brands. The results obtained show differences in intensity and frequency of play. In conclusion, a favorable, although conditional, relationship is observed between the integrated brands and the players. For their part, Portuguese university students show greater reluctance to the promotional space of the video game, conditioning their transfer to the effective integration of the brand in the narrative of the game, and to it not being the protagonist of it.

Keywords

advertising, e-sports, university, Videogames, youth

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Department

Journalism and Mass Communications

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