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Product Placement in Online Gaming

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mcdonalds-inside dept.

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."

5 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. Good for EA! by toupsie · · Score: 4, Interesting
    EA is in the business of making a profit. If product placement within a video game will fatten their bottom line, good for them and great for their investors. It doesn't seem to hurt one of the most popular spectator sports in the US, NASCAR. No one even seems to find the irony of cars flying around a circle at 200mph with beer ads emblazoned on the sides of the cars.

    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.
  2. Re:Why not? movies do it... by TMB · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Now, how do we get people to add these 'upgrades'? Oh, simple... charge them $39.95 for the next 'version'.

    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):

    [EA spokesman Jeff Brown] also said more product placement deals were likely to be announced before the game's launch, and that its online nature makes it easy for further products to be inserted later.

    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]

  3. Re:Grand Turismo Series Does It Right by Night+Goat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:What to do with the extra ad money? by Alan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:What to do with the extra ad money? by demaria · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That requires a followup question - Is the price of producing video games increasing or decreasing?