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Game Advertising Expanding, Becoming Dynamic?
Thanks to Business Week Online for its feature discussing the rise of videogame advertising, as it charts "spending on in-game advertising, currently estimated at around $200 million a year today worldwide, [and which] could reach $1 billion by 2008." As well as kid-oriented gaming sites such as Neopets.com, where "a player might stop by a Disney theater where he can play a Walt Disney movie-related game to earn Neopoints - good for buying shop space and land in the game", the article mentions Massive Inc., an "in-game advertising specialist" which is now signing up advertisers for "campaign-based advertising" in forthcoming titles from Ubisoft and Atari, explaining the innovation by describing a possible scenario: "The gamer goes online to play a racing game, for example, and a batch of ads is served. When a gamer plays offline, Massive continues to serve ads. The ads are integrated into billboards, posters, and even into the plotline of the game, and they change in real-time."
So... Does this mean that games will be cheaper (or free) in the future?
Probably not I guess, but they should be IMHO.
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Considering the fact that you have to pay $50 for the latest title, I don't think too many people would enjoy playing a game littered with advertisements. For the most part I find them distracting but I suppose that if the games themselves were free (advertisement subsidized) I suppose I could live with 'em.
So at first I imagine it will just be product placement in games, like the vending machines are all Coke or whatever. You see that today in some games.
Then maybe some banner ads.
Then before you know it, you crash your car in Need for Speed because you couldn't see the road because a huge popup was in your way.
And the flashing "shock the monkey and win your free ipod" ads are all over the place.
Then we can expect rogue advertisers to get into the swing of things. So in splinter cell, before you can steal the secret plans from the briefcase, you have to read this letter from president mugabe's uncle that says he has TEN MILLION US DOLLARS hidden in geneva that he trusts in complete confidence for you to send your bank account details to him so he can give you the money because of political strife.
Hopefully we will see some good members of the modding community hack the ads out of PC versions of games. Console gamers are doomed tho.
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But its not going to go away.
You pay $50 for a game, it shoulndt have advertisments so people are going to go for games with this. Well... look at cable TV People pay $50-100 per month for channels that have more commercials. But there is content on cable that you cant get anywhere else. Making a game compelling enough for people to purchase, well, and they maybe wont notice the ads.
But then, games themselves have been made strickly for marketing. Look at any game based on a movie licence. Ok, they are not selling other unrelated products, but they are selling a movie.
But there is a good thing in all this, not all game worlds are really compatible with advertised products. Your probably not going to be finding a +1 magic pepsi anytime soon. If you dont like advertising, dont play the games that use it. Just like you dont have to watch movies with product placement(with is about every major hollywood movie).
I could go on about creating art for profit as opposed to creating art for art, but i need sleep.
later
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The Jet Moto series always did it well, though. They tied in the appropriate "eXtrEmE" products whose image (and real world advertising campaigns) matched the game's attitude - Mt. Dew, Doritos, etc.
Odds are we'll see more RLH-type ads than Jet Moto ones.
IMHO there are severaly ways to integrate ads into games, not all of them necessarily bad. I think one of the first games to introduce some advertising was "Theme Park", where from time to time you could see a banner of a UK bank (IIRC the first few screens and the accounting screens). That didn't bother me much.
:)
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Another point is that advertising can make a game more real, e.g. in sports games. In a typical soccer/ice-hockey/... stadium there is perimeter advertising. Using this space for real, in-game advertising creates a more realistic atmosphere. Sure, the banners could all read "ACME Rockets Inc.", but it just wouldn't be the same. Racing cars would also look a bit different
All in all, if in-game advertising is subtle and does not interrupt or deteriorate my gaming experience, I (personally) don't mind it. And this definetely rules out commercial breaks in a FPS
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In-game ads have been around for at least 15 years. I'm sure many of the readers here remember seeing Pizza hut signs and logos in the Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles Arcade/NES game. But out of all the adverts I've seen within games most have been background noise. From the banners lining a stadium in something like Madden to popular music being sneaked in. Other times they're blatent and obvious, like many of Namco's shameless plugs in their games. Most notably the e-mails your character may recieve in Xenosaga about Soul Calibur II. As mentioned in another post (referring to Jet Set Radio) the ad's are chosen to match the content of the game. Sometimes this happens more for the sake of realism, take the Gran Turismo series as an example. One may look at it as if it's nothing more than an interactive car commercial. Another may see it as a very realistic racing game. The type of advertising mentioned by the article goes back to the days of radio and television. When coprorations would produce radio and television shows so that they could advertise their products nearly exclusively. For one reason or another this practice was pretty much phased out in television.Although it's unlikely that we'll see something like "Jolt Cola presents Slashdot the game" in which text would blur as your caffiene levels dropped while sifting through the trolls, flamebait and longwinded posts to earn your mod points. Don't act so surpised when you see Laura Croft driving a jeep as an interlude to the jump-jiggle-shoot that's made Tomb Raider so popular. Lets face it. Comercial entities may not be paying for the production of the whole game/tv show/radio programme anymore. Yet this doesn't mean they don't offer some funds for development in exchage for some product face time.
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So instead of needing the blue key to open the door I'll need to find the Crystal Clear Pepsi?
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I for one can't wait until the day that I am playing GTA and decide to pull over for a slice of pizza and instantly my door bell rings with a delivery. The best part is it should only cost me 4 hub caps from the game car I just jacked... Now if only I could redeem coffee and dough nuts from the game to clear my parking tickets...
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The marketing piss-takes in Wayne's World? How long will it be until master chief holds up a blue and white tin and tells cortana that "it's the choice of a new generation" ?
if advertising gets in the way of an immersive game experience, the sales on the game will be remarkably low once word gets out that instead of inserting a flashbang into a zombie's mouth, you insert a bawls which you shoot to trigger the excessive caffiene to explode. it's the same as it is for any game: say in warcraft 4 there are pizza hut bombadiers who hover from above and drop piping hot pizza onto the enemies' heads to sizzle them in sweet, sweet, melting cheeze. this can, of course be countered by the budwieser medics who pour an intoxicating elixer over the cheese wounds to nullify the heat. actually, having described all this, i want this game! you hear that blizzard? i want my pizza hut bombadiers! i want my budweiser medics! death to the immersive worlds where continuity is king - i want a game that i can't get involved in due to unecessary advertising!
and of course, the requisite penny-arcade link
Can't wait for the mods that remove one businesses ad for another. Let the litigation begin.
In-game ads are commonplace nowadays, but does anyone know what game featured the FIRST in-game ad?
The earliest I can think of is ET featuring Reeses. Well, I *think* the game had Reeses, I can't remember for sure. Although that was more product-placement than a true ad. A lot of games feature in-game billboards, but for a long time I think it was only the publisher's name and logos.
What about other early examples?
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The problem with advertising in Video Games, I think, is the same problem with advertising on the internet. The problem is that advertisers have failed to understand the consequenes of the shift from passiver entertainment (TV, Radio) to active entertainment (video games, surfing the web). Commercials on TV are annoyining, but I doubt anyone finds them as annoying as those flash ads on certain websites that you have to sit through before continuing on to see various content *cough* IGN *cough* This is because when people watch tv they sit down and wait for information to be beamed to them, while when they surf the web they are actively seeking information.
I think that the whole problem (from the advertisers point of view) is exacerbated by the prevelance of banner-blindness that most people have developed through years of web surfing.
In Game advertising can add realism to a game, and the few examples of it I've seen in good games have never hampered the play experience. At the same time however, I generally don't pay attention enough to the ads that they have any effect.
I think that if in-game advertising is going to become truly useful to the advertisers, it will be in the relm of custom content creation. For a good example, look at The Sims. Some of the most popular custom content for that game were things like Pepsi branded vending machins and Intel computers.
As online connectivity and custom content (especially in PC games, but also now in console games) becomes the norm, I think we will see the successful advertisers generating branded custom content for the most popular games.
I don't think this even has to be such a bad thing, if done correctly it's a trade off, the companies provide something of value (custom game content) in exchange for viewing their ad's.
For example, imagine Neverwinter Nights, a game with a huge community of custom content creators, I don't think it would be a bad thing if Budwiser for example, were to create a free downloadable Tavern set, with some (appropriately fantasy styled) budwiser advertisements.
Another good exmple of this is Tony Hawks Underground, there are copious amounts of advertising for skating brands in the game, and in fact being sponsored by one of them is a major step in the game. I wouldn't see it as a bad thing if $Skateboarding_Company were to release a bunch of branded clothing, boards, and even skate parks for the next THUG game.
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I recognize that advertising is important to get your company's product in the consumer eyes, and I think that this method is a lot better than ads with +20 volume SHOUTING at you about their new product. I would rather have subtle advertising (read: _not_ subliminal) than something that's in my face.
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