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Full-Motion Ads Come to Videogames
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'Advertising in videogames, dominated in the past by static ads such as billboards and signposts, is beginning to look more like TV commercials,' according to the Wall Street Journal. Massive, the company that brought still ads to videogames last year, is now introducing full-motion ads to PC-based games (not yet console titles). Massive CEO Mitchell Davis 'says Hollywood movie studios have shown particular interest in running 15-second movie trailers in online games.' Also of note: 'One problem with the full-motion ads is that gamers can easily avoid watching them. The full-motion ads start playing when a player moves near the ad spot on the screen -- and stop playing when the player moves away. As a result, gamers may see only a few seconds of the 15-second ads. Massive says it won't charge advertisers unless the full ad has been viewed.'"
Player: "Oops, time out while I take 15 seconds to watch this ad..."
Game Narrator: "As you stand in the same spot for 1.3 seconds, the demon from hell rips your head off and tosses your mangled body over the nearby cliff. Alas, you find yourself dead at the bottom of the ravine. Better luck next time."
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
..of "Ad locations" maps will flourish alongside this intiative. That, or mods to remove them altogether. Although that might chnge the game rating....
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
>>Massive says it won't charge advertisers unless the full ad has been viewed.'"
And how do they intend to track this? This is pretty scary. I kind of thought that the purpose of gaming servers was to facilitate gaming and interaction between players...not to monitor their activity.
Where does one draw the line as to what is and isn't monitored?
wbs.
Huh?
Whatever happened to suspension of disbelief? Games are generally supposed to happen in their own world - especiall online games... how can viewing a movie trailer for a real-life movie possibly fit in with the game world?
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
So, basically what you're saying is that the 40 gb hard drive I have now will be filled up with advertisements? And furthermore, shouldn't I be able to have a game that's free of advertisements, seeing as I allready paid $49.95 for the game?
-gjr
It's true. :-(
Unless the game is free, there should be no adds. If there are adds in the game and there was no warning on the box I would look into a law suit. I'm 90% sure there are disclosure laws that cover this kind of thing. And of course if there is a warning on the box that the game has adds in it, I wont be buying it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our games! Only on tv and radio...and in magazines...and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in games! No sirree."
Chalk one up for marketing progress!!!
So this means all our games now will be free...right? Like our commercial TV is free cause we watch all the ads.
And just like going to the movies is now free cause of all the ads in the beginning...right?
/Sarcasm mode terminated.
This is bullshit. If the consumer isn't getting any benefits out of it I guess I'll avoid the privilege of paying for something that throws advertisements at me.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Instead of placing ads IN the game's content, why not play them while levels are loading? It seems modern games like Doom3 and Half-life 2 take well over 15 seconds to load a level anyway. Instead of just a bland progress-bar you could be watching an AD.
In-game ads would be easier to avoid (don't go near the creek unless you want to watch an ad for the dawson's creek DVD), but would IMHO be much more disruptive to the imersion of the game. Loading screens already hurt (KILL) imersion, so you might as well throw an ad up to take my attention away from watching the progress bar slowly move.
man is machine
And I wont pay for games which have advertisements. *period*. I play games to *GET AWAY* from the bullshit that i the modern world.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Fine. Whatever. Put ads in if you want, because you were going to anyway, nothing stopped you in the movies, but if my character needs a god damn Pizza-Hut ray gun to quash the evil Ceasar overlords Im going to personally shit in your Director of Marketing's coffee.
There is truth in humor.
Putting more ads before movies has been working great for that industry.
I think they've got it all wrong... No one is going to stop and watch an ad whilest someone is shooting at them or chasing them with a chainsaw or something like that...
No, I think the characters need to be dressed in outfits like those worn by nascar drivers, full of ads. You can pick your character as the marlboro man, Mrs. exxon mobile, and the Amazon queen.
Next, to do the movie ads correctly, they need to be displayed on the torso of your opponent, especially if it's a game where you have to work on a big opponent for a while. Then, everyone is stuck watching them.
See, that wasn't hard.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
The new spelling of Text Adventure Game is Text Ad Venture.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
"One problem with the full-motion ads is that gamers can easily avoid watching them."
How sad is it that this is considered a problem?
This will no doubt mean lower video game prices now that publishers will be drawing ad revenue, right?
Their server, their rules. I personally always assume that when I'm playing on someone's game server they know everything I do in that game universe. For MMORPGs, that's pretty literally true. They have a rather massive database of what happens so they can track down bugs and exploits.
You have no right to privacy on other people's property. If you come to my house and find microphones and cameras setup everywhere you are welcome to leave, but you cannot pretend like you have some right to stop me from monitoring you.
If it bothers you, don't play games that use this service, there are plenty that don't. For that matter, there are plenty of games that are offline, they never even try to contact anything on the Internet.
This will be an interesting puzzle for level designers - advertisements are best placed in high-traffic areas to maximize exposure, but the players will then tend to avoid those areas to minimize exposure (read: annoyance and distraction). And the advertisements will be competing with game elements that are also trying to draw the player's attention- powerups, other players, stationary objects like teleporters. Advertisements will also have interesting effects on perception and types of engagement- sniping right now is just a matter of looking for moving targets, but what if they're running around in front of a giant flashing movie trailer?
A good bit of the wrongheadedness of this idea comes from the fact that in professional sports, the ads are not aimed at the players; they're supposed to be seen by the audience who is watching them. Video games have no equivalent to this, except in the "pro gaming" world, which is still too small to be an influential market
As you drive your combat skimmer across the sand dunes on Alberon VI, you notice a full motion billboard next to the bombed out ruins of the enemy's headquarters..."Get a free Experian credit report with a free 30-day credit monitoring trial."
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Alas, you find yourself dead at the bottom of the ravine. Better luck next time."
(As the screen shows the floor and your blood's dripping, you manage to see an announcement in a nearby wall:
"Headache? Take advil."
What a good way to alienate your gamers.
I mean, what if you were playing World of Warcraft, and there was a big sign for Coca Cola in the middle of Orgrimmar, that captured your screen and furthur reduced FPS as you approached it. You'd probably avoid Orgrimmar. Also, since that's a vital city to play as the Horde, you'd probably end up quitting. gg.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I couldn't agree more.
From TFA:
Fuck you Gerry Rich. It's not incumbent on you to reach me. I want you to leave me the fuck alone and keep your god damn ads out of my face. I will never pay for any video game that I know beforehand has full motion ads in it.
Question everything
The adds before a movie bother me a little, but if they tried to insert an add in the middle it would really upset me. It seems like this is what they are trying to do with video games. What they could do though is use more product placement. There are plenty of fake branded soda machines in Doom 3 and Halflife that could certainly have been Coke or Pepsi machines. I wouldn't have minded, really. If done correctly I think we can find a happy medium.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
If I go to Mars to kick ass and drink beer, I don't think it matters what brand of beer it would be. In fact if I was a smart advertiser, I'd make sure it was the competition's ads.
This bullshit of placing ads is likely to backfire and people will stay away in droves.
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I got 7 but I always make stupid mistakes
I'll accept this if they fit in the ads nicely. I want a random coke can I knock over in D3, or a "poster" in a corridor. As long as you don't interrupt my game play, or ruin my experience, fine. It's all about subtlety. We'll see who controls the amount of ads and how annoying they are. I'm guessing whoever has the largest pockets.
If I'm playing Doom 4 and I have to watch an ad before I proceed, or an ad ruins the environment (brightens the area); expect me to return your game.
Have the advertisers pay for some UT2k4 servers, then set the respawn to 15 seconds, and play adverts after you're gibbed!
This is how I would like to see advertizers get involved in the gaming industry. If they bring value to the table, consumers will appreciate their involvement. Sadly, these greedheads aren't looking to support gamers by hosting servers and providing bandwidth. They want to exploit gamers as a captive audience for their solicitations. No different from commercials in movie theaters. Advertizers are instead creating a hostile relationship with consumers.
Support gaming through sponsorship = goodwill generated
Exploit captive audience = irritating
Stop invasive commercials in movie theaters.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Massive says it won't charge advertisers unless the full ad has been viewed.
Ok so I'm in some 3d environment in the presence of an ad. Does 100% of the ad have to be on the screen? What if I'm shooting/jumping/switching weapons? Does that still count?
And regardless of the criteria, how exactly will Massive know I've viewed an ad? Unless it's an online game it's not getting past my firewall.
I sort of agree, as long as it's done well.
An example of where it's done poorly is Burnout 3. EA got their hands all over that one, and besides shoving a mostly crap soundtrack in it, they also plastered billboards for their games everywhere. Fair enough, when you drive around in real life, you see billboards too. But in Burnout, a lot of the EA billboards look like ass, they've very repetitive, and they don't have normal billboard qualities. Billboards generally have something amusing, or funny, or in some way eyecatching. They usually aren't just a crappy logo and a big title for some product.
In the grand theft auto games, the cities are full of signs with puns or clever mixups of what you might see in a real city. It doesn't effect the flow of the gameplay much, because it's done in a subtle way, but if you're just wandering around, it brings a little more entertainment to you, which is the whole point of games anyways.
Not to mention letting the developers/artists have fun. Would you rather draw a nice texture for choco-vitamins sugar pills or whatever goofy product you made up, or would you rather cut and paste logos that some marketing guy threw on your desk? The enthusiasm of the development team shows through. Maybe that's why the EA billboards in Burnout look so crappy.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
1. As long as they make people CLEARLY aware that this is happening. Which they wouldn't, since most people would then avoid it. There's a reason we had to resort to a do-not-call list in the country, and a reason that advertisers are trying to get rid of it.
2. My concern is not that people will realize how this is an invasion and avoid these games. It is that people won't care and support it anyway, proving it is a valid form of advertisement. I don't worry about people who hate this kind of crap, I worry about the ones who don't hate it. The ones who respond to spam, the ones who click on popups, the ones who give away personal info for a shiny new pen. Those are the people who are aiding in the proliferation of this crap.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
OOOOOhhh.... I CAN'T WAIT for their take on this to show up in Red vs Blue.
"Sarge?"
"Yeah!"
"Is that you up on that billboard?"
"Yeah!"
"What are you doing to that donkey?"
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
One problem with the full-motion ads is that gamers can easily avoid watching them.
Sorry, but we don't owe you SHIT. If we paid for the game, movie, whatever... we aren't obligated to watch your fucking ads.
Instead, there will be patches made to circumvent your ads. How bout that?
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