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Refreshing Taste of Sprite Invades Anarchy Online
When in-game advertising was announced as a backbone of the new free of charge Anarchy Online, it seemed like this far off concept that we'd see 'someday'. That day is now. Grimwell has a look at Rubi-Ka after the invasion of the marketeers. From the article: "The advertisements were blinking on various billboards, both in cities and in instanced missions. They randomly displayed ads for the upcoming tournament, the "Rubi-Ka rumble", or the above product placements. Obviously, one or the other of them could be existing through time, human cataclysms, and space travel to the future planet of Rubi-ka, but seeing Motley Crue ads did cause me to wonder when I'd see them touring Omni Entertainment." Totally worth it if only for the screenshots.
I see the developers were reading up on their Penny Arcade.
Seriously though, as long as they're able to avoid television commercial-like breaks in the gameplay, I have no problem with this. My biggest gripe with MMO gaming is having to a pay a monthly fee - so much so that I even gave Project Entropia a try (helpful hint: do not play Project Entropia). Since AO got some pretty good reviews, and since it's being offered for the low, low price of free, I'm certainly going to give this one a try.
People play games like this because they like to feel immersed in the world in which they're playing. Putting modern advertisements like this into games breaks the immersion (as the article pointed out) and in the end result would (1) cause people to stop wanting to play the game and (2) not make people buy these products. People that feel pissed of at Sprite, for example, because they're interfering in their game are not going to want to buy that product.
- dshaw
Let us hope that they don't get greedy, and that they have enough sales to atleast break even.
-- Dan
It's kind of hard to write this without turning it into some kind of senseless rant :(... oh well.
This is just the first step in a really fine line the developers and advertisements are trying to find. In my opinion, advertisements have gotten way out of control. For example, in my old High School there's a subtle form of advertisement where Coca-Cola gave our school a certain percentage of profit from a bunch of soda machines located around campus. I didn't realize the impact of this when I found out that our school actually had a quota to meet every month before the school could receive their cut. Yep, fat kids just so the school can pay their bills.
OK, so it's not like AO is suffering for cash with their subscribers. It's fairly explicit the advertisements are displayed to non-paying, "customers." But wait! What's this?
There are two key points in that sentence. The first is the author admits the ads break the atmosphere of the game. Honestly, imagine running around Diablo II and seeing Pepsi soda machines out in the middle of nowhere? Or playing a game that takes place 500 years into the future and flying a, "Doritos Battlecruiser," into a fight? Free or not, I'll go somewhere else, thank you.
The other point he brings up is how players might not complain if the costs are reduced or even removed. If some random company starts putting advertisements into their MMOG, they might not actually lower fees or even make it free for everybody. Subscribe to Cable TV and you'll see what I mean. For example, Cable TV is always loaded with advertisements. I pay $45/month and I still get the same number of advertisements as I would if I didn't pay any money at all. Only difference would be fewer channels to watch. Hell, I'd have to be paying $100/month or more to even hope of getting any channels advert free.
AO might keep this current model. Who knows? But I have serious doubts that other MMOG's or future ones will follow suit. Freebie accounts might have these ugly advertisements. Paid accounts might have more subtle ones, or ones you can control. The point is, the idea of paying cash to get rid of advertisements isn't going to last very long once you have that captive audience and some bean counter figures out how much more profit the company will earn.
If I'm in a game, I'd rather live without the ads. I don't want to be kicking some alien ass in Duke Nukem Forever in a sea of redundant Coca-Cola and McDonalds ads 20 years from now. I get enough of those adverts in real life.
~SavannahLion
I personally couldn't care less whether a game runs an ad or not... except for this one point the article brought up:
I found this to be a valid and worrisome point. Remember DRIV3R? Atari basically bought reviews from the gaming press to give the game an inflated review score so it'd sell more copies.
When review scores are "bought", this hurts me, the consumer. In such incentives became commonplace, how am I supposed to trust reviews to tell me which games are good and which aren't, so I know how to spend my hard earned cash?
For Matrix Online to start including ads. Take a look at this screenshot.
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http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/matrixonline/scree
Its ad for the recent film The Jacket, which unsuprisingly was released by a company owned by Time Warner.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.