Navigating Brand Safety in Toxic Gaming Worlds

Written by Oliver Buckley, Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, UK

Now the largest entertainment industry globally, generating more revenue than the music and film industries combined, gaming has become a central arena for contemporary branding (Arora, 2023). From Nike to Ferrari, renowned brands now routinely embed themselves within the gaming space to reach global audiences.

For marketers, videogames can deliver unprecedented engagement – long play sessions in immersive worlds that captivate consumer communities of millions. Yet, with this rich opportunity comes a pressing concern: gaming communities’ toxicity. Multiplayer games are notorious for deviant player behaviors that can harm other players’ experiences and raise alarm bells for marketers, including (gendered) harassment, racism, and trolling. Should brands risk their equity by appearing adjacent to harmful or abusive gaming-mediated communication?

This is the unresolved tension regarding brand safety in gaming: on the one hand, marketers want their brands to be present in popular games, while on the other hand, they seek to avoid reputational or financial damage caused by proximity to toxic players. Generally, proximity to unsafe gaming spaces is thought to tarnish brand reputation. But is this really the case?

Stefan Bernritter and his co-authors provided insight into these dangers in their recent study, titled ‘Navigating toxic playgrounds: Managing reputational and financial brand safety in multiplayer video games.’ The researchers set out to test whether toxicity in multiplayer games truly harms brands and, if so, whether the damage is reputational, financial, or both. Their findings overturn much of the conventional wisdom on brand safety and carry key lessons for marketers and society.

“What really got us interested [in brand safety] was our discussions with people from industry, where we noticed that one of the first questions they would ask if we wanted them to do something was, “is it safe to do this?” It was the number one question… but we [in academia] don’t often realize how important it is.”

-Stefan Bernritter

Rethinking brand safety

“I think many people think [brand safety] is just about brands, but it’s a much larger societal issue… if [news articles mention], for example, hunger, war or war crimes, and brands think that’s not safe to be adjacent to, that will mean they might be less inclined to report on it because they can’t monetize it.”

-Stefan Bernritter

Generally, brand safety has been associated only with reputational danger caused by unsafe contexts, which can harm sales; financial harm is assumed to only occur if the brand’s reputation is harmed first. This conventional understanding of brand safety instils a fear that advertising within toxic digital environments will damage consumer perceptions of the brand, erode trust, and in turn, negatively impact purchase behaviors. As Bernritter noted: “Brands are afraid of being associated with hateful content [because] they think their reputation will be damaged.”

However, Bernritter and colleagues’ research challenges the conventional wisdom of brand safety by separating the reputational and financial outcomes and exploring how these are independently affected by toxic gaming environments.

Findings that surprised the field

Following practitioner anecdotes that proximity to unsafe content threatens brand reputation, Bernritter et al. began their experiments expecting that brands advertising in toxic gaming spaces would experience reputational damage. Yet, the data told a different story…

• Reputation remains untouched. Despite industry fears, players rarely blame brands for other players’ toxic behaviors. “We were pleasantly surprised… we don’t find evidence that [proximity to toxicity] does anything to [harm] your brand reputationally,” Bernritter remarked.

• Financial outcomes are indirectly impacted. Toxicity reduces overall game enjoyment, and less enjoyable gaming experiences mean players spend less. The effect of toxicity on brand safety is thus an indirect one: players blame the toxic individuals rather than the brand, but their frustration dampens the whole experience, making in-game purchases less likely.

• Presence still pays. Despite having negative indirect financial consequences, Bernritter highlighted that the findings of this study show that “it’s more profitable to be in the game, even if there is a lot of toxicity, compared to not being part of it. Even a toxicity-riddled game can be very profitable to advertise in.”

Optimizing toxic environments: The role of moderation

If financial outcomes are significantly influenced by game enjoyment, can anything be done to prevent this damage? Bernritter and colleagues tested precisely this. Their findings were clear: active moderator interventions, such as kicking toxic players out of in-game matches, effectively disrupts the spillover chain. The result is that enjoyment levels hold steady, and so too does players’ willingness to spend.

This important insight shifts the conversation about brand safety from a marketing concern to a shared responsibility between brands and game providers. It is up to game providers to ensure in-game experiences include effective moderation tools so that advertising can flourish. At the same time, brands investing in gaming have incentives to push for stronger moderation policies to safeguard their spending and to sustain player communities in the long run.

Key takeaways

This research redefines how marketers should think about brand safety in gaming by highlighting the third-party spillover effects of toxic player behavior. Players rarely hold brands accountable for the toxic behaviors of other players, as they are not directly involved in managing, facilitating, or overseeing these interactions. Hence, brand safety in gaming is less about reputational danger and more about managing the indirect financial consequences of toxicity reducing players’ in-game enjoyment, in turn influencing their in-game brand choices and purchase behavior. Strong in-game moderation is thus vital for effective community management and to safeguard players’ and advertisers’ interests. The findings from this study highlight the need for more and stronger evaluation of toxicity interventions in gaming, as well as in other digital contexts where brands are present but are not directly responsible for overseeing user behaviors.

Read the paper

Interested in reading all the details about how brands can navigate brand safety in toxic gaming worlds? Click here to read the article in full.

Want to cite the paper?

Bernritter, S. F., and Danatzis, I., Mӧller-Herm, J., & Sotgiu, F. (2025). Navigating toxic playgrounds: Managing reputational and financial brand safety in multiplayer video games. International Journal of Research in Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2024.07.003

References

Arora, K. (2023, November 17). The gaming industry: A behemoth with unprecedented global reach. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2023/11/17/the-gaming-industry-a-behemoth-with-unprecedented-global-reach/

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Meet Stefan

Stefan Bernritter is a Reader (Associate Professor) of Marketing at King’s Business School and the Director of the MSc in Digital Marketing. His research mainly focuses on consumer-brand interactions in the rapidly changing digital environment and includes topics such as social media marketing, gaming, and AI in advertising.

What motivates your research?

“It’s curiosity. If I have a question, I want to know what the answer is. It can be incredibly frustrating at times, but also so much fun. I love the community aspect – working with co-authors, meeting people at conferences, exchanging ideas with smart and kind colleagues. And I find it rewarding when research has real societal relevance.”

If you were not an academic, what would you be?

“As a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, but nowadays I’d be way too scared to get into a spaceship. But I think nowadays, it’s a weird thing – I would want to have an Alpaca farm or something like that, just enjoy life somewhere rural. But luckily, I haven’t had to make that choice so far.”

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This article was written by

Oliver Buckley

Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, UK