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Product Placement in Online Gaming
ceejayoz writes "MSNBC/Reuters has an article about product placement in 'The Sims Online'. EA has made a multimillion dollar deal with Intel and McDonalds to include 'Intel's familiar jingle, its product logo, and computers using its Pentium 4 processor' and 'a McDonald's kiosk and ... the company's branded food' in the game."
EA will quickly learn if this business move is bad. Their sales will drop from "The Sims". Frankly, I have never figured out why so many people are afraid of advertising. If you don't like it, don't buy their products. The only question I have is if the Mac OS X version will drop the Intel ads?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Since this is in the online version, these will presumably be part of a world which is downloaded from the game server... and therefore easily changable. Quoting from the article (you did read it, right? oops):
I can imagine this being like stadium names, where companies sign contracts for their product to be part of the online Sim universe for N months. That would make it a nice continual stream of income for EA, and the products that are in the universe are always contemperary. No extra money from the user necessary - which is probably a selling point for the companies paying for the advertising.
[TMB]
I have no problem with product placement, as long as it is used in such a way that it doesn't interfere. For instance, in movies, it's natural to see brand name products in scenes, since we see brand name products in our lives. This could also be true for games such as "The Sims". However, I hope that they don't go in the direction some movies have, blatently shoving products down our thoats. Look at the latest Austin Powers installment. It's like watching a Heinekin commercial in some scenes.
As a side note, it's strange that Mike Meyers is such a big offender of product placement overuse, after bashing on it in Wayne's World.
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"There's a madness to my method." -mthed
The original Ultima II (1982) had a McDonalds. And not just a signpost, you could buy food there...
;)
Sadly no coffee - - had to earn gold the hard way.
Tom
I read somewhere that car manufacturers actually ask to get their cars in Gran Turismo. The only stipulation they have is that the cars can't be damaged, because that reflects poorly on them. "What a piece of crap car! I just barely touched that wall!" So it works out great for Polyphony as well as for the car manufacturers. I don't know about the billboards, though.
Actually according to an article I read the reasons they are walking billboards is due to copywrite issues. Basically it used to go like this:
gap designs cool clothing
some people buy it, and are cool
clone vendors copy it almost exactly
everyone else buys it and they are cool
This didn't jive nicely with gap etc, so they went with the route of putting their logos/names/whatever on the clothing, as the clone companies couldn't copy them then, as if the "coolness" of the design was due to something that they weren't legally allowed to copy, they wouldn't / couldn't copy it.
That said I have no idea where this article was, but the reasoning is solid IMHO.
Wonder if the Sims Online might have the same negative energies as Bladerunner. When BR came out, it featured some of the most successful and prominent companies of the time. Now all are gone (with Atari being a tool of Infogrames). I think it would be very interesting if the Sims Online had this kind of karma for the companies it advertises.
They couldn't get a license, or they were unwilling to pay for a license? Or Porsche or Ferrari didn't care enough for the game to grant a license? Project: Gotham on the XBox was able to get both the Ferrari and Porsche licenses, AND were allowed to do damage modelling, but I don't know if they paid for the licenses or were paid for them (from heresay, I've been told that Ferrari has a pretty close relationship with the Project: Gotham guys, even going so far as to push back the formal introduction of the new Enzo model to coincide with the announcement of Project: Gotham 2). Either way, these guys did it right -- real cars, real licenses, real damage (well, within reason, of course -- you can't total the car, and the damage is purely cosmetic, but at least there is still damage). Just because the Carrera GT bungs itself up really easily in Project: Gotham doesn't mean I'm going to stop lusting after one (well, there's also the matter of those cars being $350,000 to $400,000 USD, with production to begin in 2003, with the run limited to at most a few thousand of the cars ...).
Perhaps the licenses didn't really fit with what Polyphony was aiming for in their Gran Turismo series, which seems to have a major focus on import street racing. Ferraris are little more than street-legal F1 cars, and Porsches just don't seem to fit in the same class as Honda/Acura, Toyota, Nissan, etc (to me, anyway).
That requires a followup question - Is the price of producing video games increasing or decreasing?
The only problem I can identify with this business model is perversion of cause and effect. For example, if my Sim eats MacDonalds regularly, he _should_ become unhealthy. If this is not the case, then it is conceivable that among regular players, the cumulative effect of these type of 'causal anomalies' could cause the player to be less critical of their own diet. Many people identify very strongly with their Sims, and this will tend to increase the effect.
A similar problem is if the game rewards, preferentially, owning an Intel PC over a non-Intel PC.
It is also not impossible to imagine a situation whereby to keep your Sim happy, a MacDonalds is required. Or to advance the Sim's career, an Intel PC is required.
In the cases above, these placements are no longer passive. This is problematic since the game is attempting to model 'modern life', however the distortions introduced are causing the game to resemble a marketeer's nirvana.
Insufficient studies have been conducted about the effect of 'reality' games on the mind - those studies that have been done done have tended to focus on 'fantasy' games (e.g. the much publicised Doom and Quake studies).
If implemented as above, this could create a whole new method of implanting brands into people - if you spend your online time continually associating 'MacDonalds' with 'happiness', and carrying out the accociation actively, not passively, there is likely to be a significant crossover into reality.