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."
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.