Product Placement in Video Games

klaun writes: "Yahoo has a Reuters article about product placement in games. Seems that paid placements are no longer that popular because they don't work. The audience is to sensitive to advertisement being 'crammed down their throat.' Wonder what slashdot thinks of product placement." I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game.

Comments

Paid placement doesn't work...

[Peyna]

Paid placement doesn't really work, because frankly, most people don't care what the actor is drinking, or what the writing on the wall says.

It does help to make movies and games more realistic, since they will be using brands that you recognize, but that's about all it has ever done for me.

Besides, unless there is something that limits someone from using a certain product in a movie, it's pretty much going to happen anyway, why pay for it? (I might be wrong here, but you don't have pay Pepsi if you want to film a movie and there is a guy in a scene drinking Pepsi, do you?)

Re:Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

[Howie]

I challenge anyone to find a video game with advertisements in it older than that.

Tapper (1983) has you serving Budweiser to fickle customers. From memory, the C64 port did not have the tie-in, even though it was also made by Bally.

Re:Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

[interiot]

NES had a 7-Up version of Othello called Spot. The game rocked for its time, fast graphics and funny animations.

Re:Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

[innocent_white_lamb]

There were three versions of Tapper: Budweiser, root beer, and Suntary (UK).

All three versions are included in Mame (http://www.mame.net)

Placement is messed up...

[pixel_bc]

Its historically pretty messed up. You'd think they'd be paying us to place their logos -- but in practice we (game developers) have had to pay for the right to use the logo. Thats slowly changing, though. Its harder in things like stadiums. Usually the agreement states something along the lines of we can't go placing random things. We have to approach the real owner of each logo -- and if they disagree, we can't place a competitors logo in its place.

Playstation Wipeout

[marko123]

Being an Australian, I played Wipeout way before Red Bull was promoted here. So it looked like a made up sponsor for the game, and I wondered why the game promoted a pretend product so heavily. I thought that maybe it was some kind of in joke. Of course, it made sense once I knew what Red Bull was :)

It ads to the realism and pays the bills...

[PhotoGuy]

Real advertisements in games that are attempting to simulate reality, seems like a boon to me. And if helps pay the bills for the game maker, more power to them.

And dynamically changing ads would actually ad more interest to the game. I think it'd be cool to be distracted momentarily by a new interesting ad, and become someone else's frag due to the distraction. Hah!

I find it hard to see the down side. In movies, I think there's a far greater likelihood of compromising the creator's artistic integrity (when each shot starts with a well-framed shot of a Pepsi can :-); in games, where the viewpoints are less well defined, and user controlled, I think it's a lot harder to compromise the game's value.

Whenver the ads rolover, I'd be just like Homer when all the new billboard's come out. Might even end up joining a clown college because of it. "Dooo doo doo do do do do doooo doo dooo dooo"... :-)

-me

Re:Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II

[SnakeEyes]

Actually, the earliest game i can think of that has advertising in it is the arcade version of Pole Position (1982) which featured roadside billboard signs advertising other video games (centipede, digdug) as well as Atari (who released the game) and Namco (the Japanese company that actually developed it).
It's sequel, Pole Position II (1983, natch) featured billboards for Champion sparkplugs, Pepsi, and Malboro.

--Snake

It's hard to think of subjects.

[Mourice]

I've said for years that ads have a place in games. Games are very costly (with good reason, costly to develop, you know). I think that publishing companies and dev houses are loosing some of their target audience to piracy, due to the prohibitive costs of the latest and greatest games. Boys aged 12 to 25 usually have limited funds to spend on games. When those kids get older, whether they have the cash or not, they are so used to not paying and so used to ignoring ip laws that they might continue a life of crime (in casual piracy).

Now, ads have their time and place in video games. It wouldn't be right to see an "Enjoy Coke" sign just before you confront the Butcher in Diablo. In games like Deus Ex, Max Payne, and Grand Theft Auto, however, it's natural to include billboards and other types of adverts. Such endeavors add (no pun intended) atmosphere to games that already strive to become more realistic and involving.

We've seen ads in some games, but they are usually for other games by the same companies. (Sega seemed to be pretty keen on this idea a few years ago with their racing games, but I believe that it has kind of fizzled out.) Sports games are very good candidates for advertising. What two things go together better than professional sports and blatent commercialism? EA, for example, strives to make the play its sports titles more like sports produced for television. If I could get a free (or cheap) legal copy of NHL 2002, I could put up with commercials between periods. This is a game that has tv camera angles, color (annoying) commentary, realistic breaks between faceoffs, and puck highlighting extremely similar to network television. Why not go to the next step? Some of those ads could have spokespeople of the digital versions of actual Hockey players. Games are a niche market, you have a young male demographic to target. This makes advertising easy. Knowing the gender and age of 97 percent of your audience can enable more specialized ads and ultimately reach a larger percentage of them. (Ads starring Britney Spears could reach millions.)

There are a few problems with this. People will get very tired of the ads that come with the game by default. Users could be prompted every so often to download the new ads from the web site. Still, there's a problem. Advertisers who may have pulled their advertising for one reason or another will still be running on unpatched software, and new advertisers won't get the ads displayed which they have payed for. I suppose that this could be measured in downloads, and the advertisers could pay when a month is over and the usage statistics were in. Downloads could also determine payment for the original advertisers, which would be good for them, but not so good for the gaming company. When advertisers pay for television ads, they can never be sure how many viewers there will be, so they could spend a million dollars on an ad that will never be seen. Developers need to be paid, though, and the odds are that there won't be 2 million downloads (or orders or whatever) in the first 3 weeks. Another problem would be that this would keep the developers pretty darn busy in the months following a game release. This is time that could be better spent on new titles. Fortunately, if this proved popular, advertising agencies and/or the companies they represent would begin to hire professionals that could produce the commercials and sent to the game's publishing company to be inserted where they are needed. These ads would be much less costly than tv ads to write and develop (unless they used conventional tools, such as cameras and video). This brings up another problem. With the thousands of 3d engines out there, these directors and developers would have to develop in the same engine that the game is in (again, unless it's video). Moreover, they would have to learn new level designers and programs for mostly every game out there. Publishers, however, could provide them with the tools necessary (the ones the dev houses are using) early in production so that the ads could be ready by the time the game goes gold. As this becomes more common, a better plan might be to write 3d engines that support models and animations from animation programs, such as Lightwave, Maya, 3dsmax, SoftImage, or even Blender (yay for free!). Most engines support these one way or another, since there has to be a way to model for the game in the first place. Also, of course, you could do animations and put them as video in the game, but that's a wussy solution. (I think that should've been more than one paragraph.)

Gamers decidedly opposed to ads in games could still pay their 50 bucks for non-ad versions. This would not be hard for commercials or billboard ads. For commercials, just remove them. Just take them out altogether (or if you want to be weird, give the users an option to disable them and to skip ones they don't want to see with the spacebar). For billboard and neon signs and the like, just replace the ad textures within the game packages with "Eat at Joe's" and other fake ads. (Note: In the cheap or free versions of these games, you would have to put some sort of protection on these files to prevent people from creating mods that disable the ads. You'd have to tell the engine to always take these ads over any others. You also might have to put some sort of protection on the actual packages to prevent people from getting in there and actually changing those files. You might put those in a separate, protected package, but that could easily be deleted or replaced. You could put them within the actual executables or something, but then they would be really hard to replace if you wanted or needed to. The best solution I can come up with right now (5AM) is to put them in their own protected package within the main game package. Passwords might work, but some sort of encryption would be much better. Neither of those would be foolproof, but they would keep out the casual cracker and people like me who would try for 2 1/2 minutes and then forget what they were doing. You might think of something better that would keep out almost everyone, but I am certainly not the person to ask about anti-piracy measures, unless of course you want to bypass them.)


In regards to ads and product placement not working, fuck that. They work as well as any ad does. When commercials come on tv, I don't pay attention. Sometimes I leave the room, sometimes I talk to people, sometimes I just get on /., and sometimes I turn off the tv altogether. I don't know anyone who actually watches ads on any other day except the Super Bowl. My mother only watches recorded tv, so she never sees commercials. I see a lot more ads on the web than on tv, which brings me to another point entirely.

I see so many ad-supported sites going down because of revenues being down. I think that advertisers have it all wrong. Web ads are measured in clicks. That's all wrong, Cat. On the rare occasions that I do see tv ads, even if I like the ad, I don't immediately want to turn to the all-Charmin Network (or whatever product is being sold). The same goes for web sites. Just because I see an ad, doesn't mean that I immediately want to cease my current task and go to the web site for the product they are selling. Maybe if there was a checkmark beside every ad that said, "I see this ad and acknowledge it's existence." That way, bastard companies would know that I saw their ad, but it wasn't interesting enough to click on.

kill $(pidof -x Rant); *


At any rate, I see ads in video games because that's where I am most of the time. Nobody pays attention to ads anymore, no matter where they are. I don't even see pop-up ads anymore. Ctrl-Q (or Alt-F4) helps me with that. Advertising is a part of capitalism. I hope to see it progress into the video game market. Advertisers just need to learn how to use video games to their advantage. It'll keep costs down, but not punish the developers who (usually)deserve every penny of the money they do get.

P.S. I want to say that keeping the costs down of some genres and not others seems a bit wrong. It would be a shame for the FPS players to pay a lot less money for games than MMORPG fans do. This is the major hole in my arguement. I don't know how to knock it down, other than saying, "Well, they'll just have to figure out how to advertise or lower their prices." Please post or send me any suggestions about how to make this go away. You can also do it if you disagree with everything I say. Please do.


*My linux install totally fucked itself the other day, so I can't check my syntax. Don't yell if it's wrong.
procinfo | grep Rant | awk '(print $13)' | kill
pidof Rant | kill
I thought about using those, too, but they may not be right, either.