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In-Game Advertising Coming to Anarchy Online
Swedish company Funcom has signed a deal with Massive, Inc to stream advertising into public areas of Rubi-Ka, the online world within Anarchy Online. Gamespot has the story. The ads are likely a direct result of the recent subscription free business model that the company has adopted for new players. From the article: "As consumers spends less time watching television and more time playing games (as indicated by numerous studies, including one from Nielsen), the game industry is turning its attention to understanding the potential to drive additional revenue from in-game advertising." Are all massive games going to be moving in this direction, or the direction that Guild Wars will take?
How about popup ads in a first-person shooter, with the ability to blast the hell out of them with a BFG?
..I could care less. If they want to advertise, go for it. It'd be awesome if they could make the adverts game related, display them on billboards, etc. Make em' seem like they belong.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Anarchy Online has bilboards across all cities at Rubi-Ka, and Alienware has been an advertiser there for a long time. If the new adverts are limited to those bilboards, I wouldn't mind. In fact, I'd see it as a nice distraction, at least for a while.
If they have in-game ads I would expect in-game stores too.
Well as long as they don't detract from the game ;) I've seen sponsor brands subtly advertised in some movies.
I don't not believe there isn't a God.
If they added anything annoying to any of my MMORPGs I'd probably leave. I imagine this is the same for most other players. A LOT of MMORPGs have many fans who are borderline ready to leave and just need the proper push out the door. However billboards, posters, and suttle refferences wouldn't be bad. Lets say a WoW quest called Bigger King if done in an appropriate method it would be ok. Basically the same as what they have but Paramount paying for the references to their movies and Nintendo paying for the references to their games. For DAoC, EQ, and Planetside, I see no way to do it effectively without ruining the atmosphere. WoW could do it by references only. SWG could probably do billboards.
Please tell me that they will doing this via in-game avatars advertising for real-world products.
Nothing would please me more than to make it my personal mission to hunt down each one of these characters and nuke the ever-loving tar out of them.
Imagine the sheer joy of being part of a AdPK guild.
Advertising like this will work, but ONLY if the player gets something in return. In this case, the player does not have to pay a subscription fee. That seems like a fair trade.
...THAT explains that billboard for "Viagra" I saw on Tatooine... and I took it literally that it would give me "the force"!!!! I'm so bummed!
Isn't it possible - in fact, far more likely - that Funcom secured in-game advertising as a source of revenue first, and then decided that they could make the game subscription-free? The article suggests that it happened the other way around.
Yeah this is ok if it makes it free - but only then.
This could well be part of the slippery slope of making computer games into tv. With tv you pay for cable and then have to pay for it again in adverts. And don't say they're seperate things because there not. If I have to pay extra a month to get a channel like e4 (UK) then i shouldn't be made to watch adverts. Full stop. At least have two rates of pay - cheap with adverts and expensive without them.
Pretty soon you'll be paying for games and watching adverts while they load - and it won't make them cheaper to buy! Why do you think there touting £60 for a next-gen game? So they can charge them at the same prices as before but with more adverts in. Mark. My. Words.
P.S. This is an off hand prediction based on emotion and guesswork rather than science, logic and stock trends - so back off!
In eve, in many space stations, they are advertising a website, that you can get a subscription to using in-game money. I won't go into details, but it is a long-standing joke in the game.
Like real estate, except you can make more of it.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
As I posted in a link above, they are non-intrusive. The game's already full of in-character advertisement for things like the Bronto Burger and varions expensive weapons and some strange billboards with the words PWNZ ME in big red letters and pictures of low level mobs called Leets dancing on them. Free players will just start seeing paid advertisements instead, and they'll also be made to fit the game's atmosphere (as much as a McDonalds commercial can fit into a 300th century warzone, I suppose).
FUNCOM is Norwegian, not Swedish.
In fact it's even worse! "New York City-based Massive Inc" has deals with "eight game publishers, including Ubisoft, Atari, and Vivendi Universal" because "We are sure advertisers will cherish this revolutionary new opportunity to reach the extremely valuable 18-34 demographic...[and] we know that most gamers want in-game advertisement to heighten the sense of realism."
Fuck you massive, the last thing I want is that kind of realism. This will only harm originality. Imagine the execs with this:
Game Designer: I got a great new idea - it's set in a bizzare fantasy world/during the great fire of london/victorian times/Ancient Rome/Space (etc) and ...
Exec: Wait! How can we put pepsi/coke/generic generation-x product adverts in that! We'll lose vast amount of revenue!
Game Designer: Hmmm. We could make another game where you drive a generic car around a city at night past bill-boards? We could add a cutting edge musak to it? They'll pay for the exposure these days.
Exec: I love it! But we need more titties...
Just a little PA with Relevance for you. Tho in AO's case it would be "My Nanites need PEPSI!"
9 -18&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-0
Horrific "Slippery Slope" or innocent ad revenue only time will tell... mmmm Lymon
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Free players will just start seeing paid advertisements instead, and they'll also be made to fit the game's atmosphere (as much as a McDonalds commercial can fit into a 300th century warzone, I suppose).
"Have you had your break today?"
Doesn't this kind of ruin the attempt at immersion in a game? Every time you see an ad for something that is completely unrelated to the game, that instead makes you focus on the real world.
From what I understand, some MMORPG players play the game as sort of a temporary escape from real life. I bet some people would get pretty annoyed if they say an in-game ad for a technical institute or some other advertisement that implies that they're not working hard enough.
True story.
I think that's terrible.
One of the reasons to NOT watch TV is because of the incessant advertising. I don't like ads in my movies, and I don't want ads in my games.
Gaming is about being told lies and enjoying it. Advertising is about lying to me to get me to do what you want me to do. One is relaxing, the other is not.
VFX is more influential than you think.
Is located here.
This is the funniest review I've ever read.
You can't ride two horses with one ass
If you play the SSX series, GTA, GT4, and a few others, they already have in-game adverts. SSX 3 does it with dnL (the 7up with caffeine thing), Honda, and a few others. I can't remember what all was part of the GTA advertising, as I never played much of it, but I know it was there.
Personally, being a little new to the MMORPG type games, I have already found that as new updates/versions come out, they are raising the prices of them. That's one reason I haven't tried WoW or EQ2 yet. I can't see spending more than the $12 I pay for FFXI.
Although, with EQ2 now letting you order pizza from within the game, I might be a little more interested... (now that's a product tie-in.. just type /pizza in the game to order one from the local Pizza Hut).
The green dragon wakes up and spreads its wings, revealing huge ads on the underside of each. As it flaps these ostentatiously, it squeals out a moan that sounds vaguely like a product jingle. It coils back to breathe something on the unsuspecting players, and they scramble back. Is it fire? Will it breathe frost? Poison gas? They select the appropriate brand of shield just as the dragon finishes recoiling and lifts its tail. Phooosh! From a safe distance they watch as it breathes... flyers, each one with a different ad. Now the entire landscape is covered with them. The floor and every rock, tree and even waterfall is textured with them. Some of them flit about in mid air and just seem to float in front of the players.
The level 3 characters flee in a panic, obviously outmatched by their quarry. But the flyers are slippery, and they make little progress in the morass and, exhausted, begin to slide backward. In an attempt to get away, they try to jump, but land face down. They realize they cannot get away now. They are being pulled in. All they can see as they meet their fates are the deadly flyers on the ground, one scrolling after the other. They begin to argue amongst themselves about the choice of mission.
But wait... The dragon sneezes and they are blown back up the hill. They do everything possible to get up, but nothing seems to work, so they start sliding back downhill again. Scrolling, scrolling...
Played F1 racing, or GTA recently? All of the cars were placed with the blessing of, and in some cases payment from, the manufacturers.
It's Norwegian!
Jeeze, is getting nationalities straight so much to ask? And no, we're not the capital of Canada.
for great justice
Space Quest V - made back in 1995. Sprint ads any time you contacted another ship. Since it's a sci-fi themed game, so the ads did cut down on the immersion some, but they didn't interfere with the gameplay.
I just hope that if in-game ads start becoming more mainstream, they don't start interfering with the gameplay, and that there's a way to opt-out.
...'Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!'
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It is often easer to gain forgiveness than permission
as if commercials in the movie theatre weren't bad enough!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!