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In-Game Advertising Comes of Age
TotallyUseless writes: "Yahoo News is running a story about how in-game advertising is becoming more and more popular, and could become the norm soon. It is an interesting article and explains the reasons why game publishers and advertisers both see great potential in this." Bleh.
Take a look at the Gran Turismo series ( http://ps2.ign.com/games/13846.html )
it definately IMHO adds to the realism of a game about a very comercial industry. This is already the best racing game for its physics and realism, I only hope the ad revenue makes it a better game.
First of all, as others here have noted, there have been ads in games for years now. The Red Bull ads in the second Wipeout game were among the more clever, but look at sports titles too. When you see Coke, Panasoinc, Valvoline and Reebok logos in racing games, those are paid ads. There has also been product placement in RPG games for a while.
Michael, Michael, Michael. Do you have any idea how much it costs to create a new game these days? It's millions of dollars, often tens of millions. You want RPGs with giant worlds with realistic streets and buildings full of furniture,and knickknacks, and dozens of voice actors saying lines for a hundred or more animated characters? You want sports games where hundreds of motion-captured athletes are simulated down to physical tics, and cars are simulated from their oversteer and gear ratios to the pitch of their exhaust noise? Fine.
Now bear in mind that the publisher is selling the game to retailers for less than half the suggested retail price--often much less, because they're also paying for shelf space and local advertising even beyond their own national ads. And that's the publisher. The developer, unless they're a one-stop shop like EA or Sega, gets a small fraction of that.
You whine whine whine every time a game development shop you like gets bought out or goes out of business, and you whine whine whine when they try to sell ads to offset those insane development costs.
Be cool if it were something like product placement ads in a movie. Someone drinking a coke, or wearing a T-shirt with a logo.
Think about it, in an FPS, blowing away bad guys and monsters that are wearing corporate logo might be fun. "DIE Microsoft, DIE Target!!"
-josh
The reason for such blatant branding isn't all about advertising. In order to protect their fashion design the designers stylize their logo and stick it on their clothing. Tommy Hilfiger shirts are identified by not only their colours but their logo. Were the logo not there, anyone could make a similar shirt with a similar cut and sell it cutting in on Tommy Hilfiger's profits. By having a very marketable logo and stylizing it on products you prevent people from copying your style. It's VERY profitable and smart marketing dude. Clothing companies are good at it and thus make lots of money.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What I find interesting is the idea of using that to make virtual worlds more lifelike. Sure, you wouldn't see an ad for Coca-Cola in Everquest or Asheron's Call without suffering a bit of disbelief--but imagine a futuristic cyberpunk virtual world project like Neocron, whose screenshots already reveal advertisements for fictitious in-game products like "Tyrell Bionic Implants". In fact, in the Miscellaneous section of their FAQ, they note:
You see that? Not only will it reduce costs, and make the advertisers happy, it'll enhance the verisimilitude, the realism, of the game by making it seem more and more like you really are in such a city. I think that's all to the good.--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
the income from ads will be used to reduce
the price to the consumer...
yeah.
sure.
It's kinda hard to know what to do about this -
with TV when the ads become too annoying I just turn the TV off and go read a book or something.
But a computer game - where I've already paid for it...
I find this idea as offensive as the compulsory
(no fast forward) advertising they put in DVDs.
The only place I'd find it acceptable is in real-world simulations. Racing games, maybe flight sims, possibly some of the FPS's. Other games I play to *escape* the shit that's in RL, not immerse myself in more of it.
- Muggins
Commercials influence you, whether you think you pay attention to them or not. And the most annoying ones are the most effective. Think about that for a second.
Advertising in games will provide another revenue stream for game creators. This effect will be very bad. Now instead of working on making the game better, game publishers will be concerned about hyping the game so they can get more ad revenue. "The most awaited game of the year!" "Give your ad budget to us!" Small publishers (read: creative publishers) won't get any of this money.
Just think about all the ad revenue that daikatana could have pulled in. The hype was amazing... the newspaper articles, the fawning websites, the mention in Playboy... advertisers would have been falling all over themselves trying to get their product placement into daikatana... "I don't care if it sucks, I read about it in the New York Times!"
It is a good thing that Ion Storm lost a bundle on daikatana. They should have. The game sucked. Romero is an idiot. Losing millions on the game taught them this lesson, that they won't soon forget.
Advertising revenue would have reduced the power of the lesson. That would have been a BAD THING.
--
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
The only ads I pay attention to are A) Funny or B) During the super bowl (e.g. funny).
We've become desensitized to pretty much all advertisements. Do you know what the ad at the top of this page is right now? You saw it, but you didn't notice. The first game to have ads might see success, but by the second game no one will notice the ads anymore.
In addition, maybe I'm crazy, but I don't really make product choices based on what I see in ads (Except of course, Pepsi because of Brittney Spears!!! She's hot.)
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>open mailbox
The mailbox is overflowing with all sorts of gaudy mail with pictures of various commodities and colourful logos.
You feel slightly uneasy...
>run away
You can't do that right now.
>west
You are standing in front of a McDonalds(tm) restaurant.
There is a can of Coke(tm) here.
>drink Coke
It's very refreshing...
>west
It is dark here. You might be eaten by a grue(tm).
No sig.
This isn't anything new. Wipeout (96?) had Red Bull ads in it, some of WildTangent's games have had banner ads in the loading screens, and online games like Trivial Pursuit Online and Flipside.com games have had mid-game full screen ads in them.
/., I always cringe, since it means either a whole bunch of misinformed posts are going to be created, or I'm going to have to read an article about something that happened ten years ago...
There have even been full-length console games for which the sole purpose of them was to advertise - I think mainly of the "Cool Spot" and "Fido Dido" games for 7-up.
Bleh, indeed. Whenever I see a game related topic on
In Japan only, Final Fantasy 9 was sponsored by Coca-Cola, and they had a 15 and 30 second TV ad that showed the characters running through one of the major towns in the game chasing after a shining Coke bottle cap. TheGIA has the commercials, sorry, no direct links. (URL is www.thegia.com)
Could this happen to a game? hard to say. TV is very advertising-dependent, and game development seems more like movie-making. But check this out (from the story): Here's EA straight-up planning to use advertising as a prime source of game funding. Will this be reflected in better contracts with content producers? Yeah
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
In the next Zelda, we will be fighting a giant ogre brought to you by Microsoft. :-) Kinda symbollic....
I mean, we're forced to have ads in the games, why should we have to pay to get ads??
Same reason you pay for newspapers/magazines/etc. The advertising subsidizes it. IOW, if the ads weren't there, it'd cost a lot more. For example, without advertising, your average newspaper would cost around $5 (rough estimate). But add in ads and you get a 90% discount.
---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
"While you load your saved game, why not load up on delicious Campbell's soup!"
"Great screen shot you just took. Speaking of screen shots, nothing takes shots like the new Kodak l33tz0r 3000 Camera!"
"Star Trek: Borg Invasion is loading, please wait. And now an advertisement from our sponsor, Microsoft..."
I wouldn't mind having ads in games...I wish that game companies would stop advertising the game and game systems themselves inside the game! I've alread bought the game and the system; I don't need to be reminded of those things every time I play. By that I mean not constantly telling me that I'm playing "NBA 2k" on SEGA brand SEGA genesis. I mean, remember the original game boy and how it said "nintendo" when you turned it on? It was annoying because you'd have to watch that every time!(And it took a while.) Then there was sega genesis...the EA sports games always had real long intro scenes. You'd see "SEGA Genesis" followed by "Licensed by SEGA", etc. as if I didn't know which system I was using or what game I was playing.
Got friends?
non-intrusive billboard-style advertising, what's the problem again?
we've had corporate logos and such in games for YEARS, the fact that it's now paid advertising merely means more funding to create better games, and I'll bet you it's a hell of a lot more effective than ad banners, and it doesn't eat up bandwidth, and again, it's non-intrusive, and infact could add another element to the game... I mean say you've got a bright red coke sign, if your opponent in black is standing right infront of it, you've got a perfect target, right? (actually this is a real example... there's a bright red sign in the Action Quake2 map urban, and people are constantly hooking on to it on the server I play on and giving me a perfect target)
Adds Heather Berry, editor at Happypuppy.com, a gaming fan site, ''If gamers like the game, they don't care about the product placement.''
So I guess I'm in the minority there, too. Wow, do I ever have the market cornered on THAT one! But, seriously, what I'm wondering is, will Gamespy and the other mass information and preview "outlets" start warning us about ad-riddled games before we buy? If not, there will soon be a need for a game ad warning site, where they list the newer titles and how invasive the advertising is. With that on our side, it will be possible to boycott the companies doing this. If not, then you wouldn't know until you played it that a game pauses every 5 minutes to show you an ad for a fscking burger.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Me a Mario!! I shop at the GAP, and jump a super high in my Nikes. I have to save Princess Britney Spears from the clutches of the evil coke can, but need to collect all the Pepsi Products before I have enough energy to take on the darkest evil in the universe.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. --Robert Benchley
"I mean, radio has a lot of commercials, and we don't pay for it!"
That is on it's way.... "Digital" satellite radio (by Sirus and XM) which is about to come out is subscription only... And XM (partly owned by Clear Channel, a huge radio megacorp that is pioneering the 20-commercials in a row that is driving people AWAY from radio) WILL have commercials...
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-Henry
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