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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."
One thing I've always wondered about this wonderful set of games is exactly how much wheeling and dealing did they have to do to get as many "real" cars and products into the game.
In any event it is the perfect touch: a race track without product billboards isn't very realistic. Cars that you can say "Hey I know someone with that car" are playable. You can walk into a tire store and look at the same tires offered in the game.
Software companies promote themselves all of the time in their own games but should they now seek ad revenue for games? Hungry companies could see this is a new boon. Players could start to see this as a new bother.
However the GT series does this correctly because it is subtile. The car designs and products are the ads themselves...you don't need to be intrusive with load screens shouting "Parts of this game were funded by Soandso". If players start seeing intrusive ads they'll start to turn away from it.
While I'm sitting here drinking my cold, refreshing Coke, I looked on my KDS LCD flatscreen monitor that I bought from ThinkGeek and realized that they should apply this to TV shows as well. Why interrupt a show with a commercial break when product placement could work just as good? In the movie "The Truman Show", which I watched the other day on my DirectTV satellite system, the "show" that the movie was about had no commercials, just product placements. While that was just a movie, if The Sims proves this can work for other mediums, maybe we'll soon see a future where Tivos can no longer skip over commercials because there AREN'T any to skip over.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
But Mc Donalds meat is already simulated meat. So when it gets used in a simulation, does it become real meat? What a philisophical pondering...
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Pop ups in games add value to the product. You are lucky the price isn't going up for these features.
In the middle of fragging your friends in Doom3, a message appears in the console:
This small show of violence was brought to you by the NRA. Without us, your dreams of actually owning your own mini-gun will never be realized.
I love you Charlton Heston, you damn filthy ape!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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.
So, in a game that's [potentially] going to be the very worst for abusive play, do you really want your brand getting associated with it? Imagine the joy of having "A Mac Attack" becoming the most hated concept on the net. Or maybe the next "A rape in cyberspace" story beginning, "It was under the pixelated golden arches of a virtual McDonalds..."
Money can't buy that kind of advertising. Probably for a very good reason.