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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."

2 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: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.