Slashdot Mirror
Massive Inc. Advertising Takes Off
Bluecobra writes "PlanetSide, a FPS-based MMO game published by Sony Entertainment of
America (SOE) is now using advertising in-game. PlanetSide already charges a fee of $12.99 a month to play and now users are also treated to Fanta, Coca-Cola, and Deuce Bigalow advertisements." Additionally, Martey writes "A recent patch to SWAT 4 introduces dynamic in-game advertising in the form of randomly generated posters on walls in the game. Provided by Massive, Inc., the game downloads new ads each time the game is loaded. Even more onerously, the game contacts Massive's servers to provide data about the length of time and viewing angles that the player looked at the posters."
Next your going to be telling me that Slashdot gets money for that flashing banner Im looking at.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
If game companies are now allowing ads into their games and claiming that it's a new revenue for them to help improve the quality of games, would it be possible for the game companies to actually LOWER the prices of the games because of the new source of revenue? ...Just a thought...
However, it sounds like EVIL, EVIL, EVIL.
You know what I mean -- stuff that google wouldn't touch.
How can you fit Deuce Bigalow ads into a game about dominating a planet?
you shell out $45-60 for the game, plus $10-15/mo to play and then they shove advertising down your throat?
how long until ms adds this as a "feature" to office? apparently the new aim client already includes monstrously obtrusive advertising in im windows, so i can't imagine that it will be too long before the less scrupulous software vendors out there insist on interrupting your work every ten minutes with a full screen ad....
Well, they're welcome to do what they like. Lots of pay for clothing with logos on them, advertising the company that made it. Personally, I never pay for advertising. If someone gives me a shirt for free with their company name on it, I'll consider wearing it, but that's about it. This philosophy also applies to video games, if they want to go that route. Give it to me for free, and i'll consider playing it. But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay good money to be barraged with advertising.
As for advertising in other games, I have mixed feelings. For example, I would have no problem at all with a big Coke billboard showing up while I'm tooling around town in a GTA game. It's supposed to be based in a reality similar to our own, so if a company doing this kind of game can make a few bucks by selling ad space, more power to them. Using GTA as the example again, though, real commercials (that couldn't be turned off) on the in-game radio stations would stop me from buying the game. That kind of ad would be overly distracting for me.
As long as ads are unobtrusive (background) and organic to the game setting (no "The monks of Qeynos drinks Coke, why don't you?"), I think they're fine. It certainly doesn't bother me when I play a golf game and I choose the Ping golf clubs, nor does it put me out of sorts to drive a Chevy in a racing game. But if I'm exploring space, there'd better be a damn good continuity reason to be flying between stars and see a giant, flashing Nike logo...
So they show posters of real products, whoop-de-fuck. Either the game's worth paying the monthly fee or it's not, Coca Cola posters aren't going to make or break the game. I just hope they're not stupid enough to actually cause inconviences in the game with the ads.
"Derp de derp."
How long will it take before users will react with ad-free game patches and tricks to stop the ads from being downloaded/displayed or statistics recorded? A simple trick might be to block a certain port from the game, if they use a seperate server for the ad system..
Death by snoo-snoo!
http://www.al-qaeda.cjb.net/
just so I could cancel my account of disgust
That's a pretty disturbing thought. If the ads are germane to the setting of the game--I support that idea, at least, since I don't want my lv. 97 Superlative Love Ninja to heal up by drinking Sprite--then that'll prompt game creators (or maybe I should say publishers and developers) to set more games in modern/semi-future times in order to make more money.
We'll see more Madden NFL games and fewer Fallouts. More GTA knockoffs (and not Vice City, either) and fewer Final Fantasy knockoffs. More Counterstrikes and fewer HL2s.
Advertising just seems to keep getting more and more out of hand, it's bad enough I have to sit through 10 commercials when I paid $10 to see Star Wars. Now I get to PAY for a game AND watch their god damn advertisements.
I don't like having products crammed down my throat, if I'm interested in something, I'll look it up ON MY OWN. This is why I love my Tivo.
If they're going to start forcing me to watch their advertisements in game, AND collect how many seconds I sat around hating the goddamn thing. Then we should also be getting the game for a major discount, or free. Which of course would never happen, and personally, I wouldn't feel guilty at all for pirating this game, although I probably wouldn't play it cuz of the goddamn ads.
I once worked with a guy who lived in Bosnia, and according to him, satellite equipment must be purchased, but all the channels are free once you get the equipment setup. And why?? Because of the FUCKING commercials. They're already making money off the advertised product, why are they charging us more?
And TV commercials are getting worse too, every channel is synchronized so you can't get away from them by skipping channels, and they run them every 10 minutes. But at least TV is somewhat regulated.
Not like the goddamn internet, where advertisers are free to do WHATEVER they want, spam, spim, malware, adware, spyware, and general scumware. I DON'T WANT TO ENLARGE MY FUCKING PENIS! It just goes to show you how pathetically desperate and far these people are willing to go.
But still, I wish them all the same fate as Vardan Kushnir
</RANT>
Mein Thirsten!
Man, that's still funny. Thirsten.
This was _three years ago._ Are we through fighting this spectre, or are we in for the second round? Why didn't EA keep up with this sort of thing? _EA_ of all people/companies.
While I'm at it: we've been seeing product placement in movies for years. Does that mean we don't see as many movies set in 3000 AD or 3000 BC because of lucre?
No. Greed makes us have to sit through a quarter hour of ads (more if you arrive early) before the previews if we'd like to see a movie in a theater. Why can't they plaster game boxes with ads and package sixty little fliers in with the games? Although I guess what I'm suggesting is more along the lines of adding fifteen minutes of ads before the unskippable "EA GAMES OWNS YOU" and "NVIDIA THE ONLY WAY TO PLAY ON YOUR ATI BOX" segue videos we have to put up with today. That's a scary thought, too.
Okey, now it made sense when FunCom gave free access to there MMO Anarchy Online, they put (real life) adverts on the already well used advertising boards throughout the game. People who paid monthly for their accounts would have the adverts removed.
This just seems to be another way for the MMO people to get another few $ from your account. They're breaking the immersion of it, imagine having a "Diet Coke Lemon" advert while hacking up some Orcs in a far far place...
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
KY sex jelly ads featuring dwarfs. Watch yer beck!
Ok, this is really starting to piss me off. I took my gf to see Charlie and the chocolate factory a couple of weeks ago. This was a early evening show that was supposed to start at 7:10 (wich cost over $20 us with snacks) after 10 complete minutes of advertisements including a cell phone ad and a tide ad, not to mentiont the trailers and ads for the snack bar the movie finally started I was so pissed I wanted to leave. I really felt like they should have payed me to wathc all that crap.
I cancelled my subscription about 6 months ago because I didn't have enough time to play, but I'd been thinking about going back after Battlefield 2 didn't really deliver (the game is fine, the players are retards, Planetside's monthly fee makes for a nice gated community). But SOE just made my decision for me. I'm not resubscribing to Planetside while they have advertisements in there.
:(
I enjoy playing games to get away from the shit-eating commercials that are on TV, on the radio - and even at the movie theater now. Games were one of the last media refuges that you could flee to escape their retarded propaganda and just enjoy without having PRODUCT forced in your face.
Thank you very much advertisers, you've just gone and ruined videogames.
(And SOE, here's a cluestick: Make Planetside 2. Shooters have a much shorter life expectancy than RPGs. The population is dropping because a sequel is needed, not another crappy expansion pack that introduces more problems than it fixes.)
No, they won't lower the prices of games. They will, however, be able to keep the price of games even despite inflation, just as they have for years and years. A game was about fifty bucks when I was little, it's still about fifty bucks twenty years later.
You are walking downtown. The year is 2150, and you see a billboard with Jen. Lopez, advertising the release of Gili (I think that was Jen Lopez, who cares) on 1337-DVD format (she did suspended animation-freezing-monkey-hokey stuff to stay alive).. Except there is a giant phallic-shaped object crudely drawn on her forehead, now.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
The players should act now and massively cancel their accounts. The signal would be very clear.
Well, we also had MC Kids for the NES (which wasn't half bad), and some game about Cheetos for the SNES... Chester Cheetah?
Those aside, I can't remember any other glaring examples offhand. I like to think that sort of thing died with the early 90's. Maybe you can count some sports games and that sort of thing in there since they're basically _made_ so that you're simulating playing football with actual players, driving real cars, etc. The people who buy those games, though, don't need to see NFL or McLaren (or whatever) ads--they're suffused with the former, and can't afford the latter. You could only succeed with this sort of ad cum game by pitching it to people who can afford it--sell popular junk food and junk TV to teens who're too brain-dead to realize they're not actually playing one big ad, but are doing so in essence. Throw it on top of the piles of ads in the uninspired TV they watch, the vapid magazines they read, the movies they watch at the theater; all the nonsense that people who don't buy crap because they saw it in between Big Brother and the nightly news put up with on an increasing basis.
I'm off-subject. Unless they come to dominate the genre, I'm not afraid of entire games devoted to promoting a product in this day and age. I'm afraid of the subtle infiltration of ads into other games, that I'll have to sit through three minutes of commercials while FFMCMXLI loads, or click through Sony ads whenever I die in Counter-Strike: Substance, or dine in GTA4 at Taco Bell. I don't want to see real-life ads in my video games, because I don't play video games to emulate real life. I don't want to play as cheeky pop-culture caricature Bingo Protagonist, siding with McDonald's or Burger King in between missions. I'd love to see more clever spoofs of real-world ads and corporations as much as I'd hate for the industry to be infiltrated by actual corporate advertising.
An Eldrich Gun-Fu Shotgun Dancer healing with a can of Sprunk could even be funny, under the right conditions.
Oh I forgot, it's /. so that means advertising is automatically bad.
I mean, we pay for cable TV and (with the exception of the expensive premium channels) we still see advertising.
If this means that they can help offset the cost of game development by selling in-game ad space, then that's great.
Do I want the game to be overrun with ads? No. But that's a balance the developer needs to find.
And, as for the comment about the game sending back data to the server about how long an ad was looked at... that's the kind of innovation that can really make something like this successful. Advertisers (the people who pay) love that stuff... and that feedback is 100x more useful than radio or cable, where they can barely guess how many people were tuned in -- let alone paying attention.
-David
There actually might be a little more to this. Planetside was never really a big hit, and years latter I imagine its population is not growing. My guess is that they are either close break even in terms of profits. If that is the case, then advertisement is a way to stretch out the life of the game a little. Granted, it might simply kill the game faster, but give the choice of killing it now, or throwing in a few ads and extending its life, which would you pick?
Granted, this is all speculation. I have no idea fanacial status of Planetside.
how long till intrepid game hackers start putting ad-blocker mods out for these games?
Interesting that some argue, that ads in games are acceptable, when that reflects reality, like billboards in GTA. While I understand this argument on a "suspension of disbelieve" basis - it also means, that where we're annoyed in the real world, it's also okay to annoy us in it's virtual counterpart. More energy should go to fighting ads in the real world like billboards (where the audience doesn't profit), than those in computer games.
Why not contiue this "advertising when you already paid" trend everywhere? I have a great idea! If only there was a way they could print advertisments on my Food Then I would be happy.
They let me shoot any billboard I don't like with my grenade launcher, and blow it to tiny pieces.
Track that!
By the way, the word is illogical.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
Apparently their's a way to filter the adds from your system but editing your systems hosts file to redirect all the ad provider servers URL to 127.0.0.1.
Now, I've never done this before but it seems simple enough, the problem is, what are the server names? Their was a post on the SoE forums about this but SoE removed it (I knew I should have copied it as soon as I saw it!) But in general, I guess I could wait till it goes live and then snoop my own machine.. But I know someone has this info somewhere. Anyone? Sentack
They're in the form of billboards that you see occasionally as you're running along the freeway, or on the sides of buildings. At first I thought they were fake ads, and I was really impressed that they'd put something like that in, but in fact they're real ads. They are in fact unobtrusive, fit in nicely with the game, and don't bug me at all. What bugs me are the "this space for rent" ads.
:')
But frankly the whole thing is deeply amusing to me, and I'm not sure why people are so up in arms. As one of the twelve people who play MxO, I am there because I like the visuals, and the ads actually make the visuals better. So although I am rabidly offended by ads in movie theatres before movies, I don't mind the MxO ads at all. YMMV.
Even more onerously, the game contacts Massive's servers to provide data about the length of time and viewing angles that the player looked at the posters.
Sounds to me more like the actions of some spyware than a game.
Putting that aside, we all knew it was coming and it was only a matter of time. There shouldn't be a problem with ingame advertising as long as it is relevant to the time frame / storyline of the game. To me it would make the game seem more realistic.
Playing a game like EverQuest and seeing an advertisement for Duece Bigalow on the side of the Freeport Arena would completely ruin the play experience for me. Seeing it in a game like maybe The Matrix Online wouldn't be that far-fetched.
Don't like the ads? There are two things you can do to protest. You could drop your subscription, never play anything with ads, and grumble about it on forums while the majority of people ignore them and play. You lose out on some fun, everyone else keeps doing their thing. Advertising finds it's home in games, people get used to it, and 10 years from now it looks like movie theaters today with all the advertising that happens there.
The other is my preferred method. Use the advertising model to protest. Make it cost more than it's worth to the advertiser. Create a bot that constantly goes from one ad to another, racking up seconds of view. Get everyone in your clan to spend 10 minutes doing nothing but watching ads every session so the cost of the ads will go up greatly. A few people creating protester scripts and unleashing them to the masses so that you can set it to watch ads all day while at work/school means many, many hours of ads being charged back to the advertising company. The method of advertising becomes very expensive yet the marketing departement does not show that it provides increased revenue. Upper management cans the advertising method as it is now nothing more than a money-hole.
The advertisements are showing up due to the "almighty dollar", why not use the dollar to send them away? I can't afford to buy the adspace and leave it blank, and I still want to play games. If I can do something to get rid of the ads I will - but I won't drop all video games and spend hours on a forum complaining that there's advertising in all the games I used to play.
You've got it right. They'd be thrilled if someone in the game took the time to "hack" a poster.
Show enough T&A in your ad and you will get eye-time, guaranteed.
It won't take long for the ad-execs to figure this out.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
So that's another MMOG you can subscribe to only to cancel immediately. :-)
The problem isn't actually the advertising, it's that Sony are submitting people to it without decreasing the subscription cost.
In AO, only free accounts have to suffer enforced advertising by Massive through in-game billboards. Everyone else has the choice of turning it off.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As long as I can shoot, blow out, and destroy these ads in game they are fine with me. I hope that gets reported to their server. "User lupinster viewed ad for 2 seconds then shot at it for 12 seconds then destroyed it with a grenade."
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
would it be possible for the game companies to actually LOWER the prices of the games
Funcom and UbiSoft have gone one better than merely lowering the price, because they've made game accounts in AO *FREE* except for the "cost" of having to endure enforced advertising by Massive.
That's a good tradeoff, for those who don't want to pay a monthly sub in cash.
Of course, Sony is about as magnaminous and open minded as SCO, so don't expect to see them dropping their prices.
http://www.gucomics.com/archives/view.php?cdate=20 050810
Advertising is advertising. I don't care where it comes from, the only real metric is whether it annoys me.
We live in a commercial (as in based on commerce, not as in based on ads) world. I expect people to try to sell me things. The only requirement I've had is that you don't annoy or bore me. If you can do that, I don't care if your ad is at the start of a movie, in the middle of a show, embeded in a game, or plastered across a t-shirt. Hell, if you do it well enough I will even take the effort of actually seeking out your ad and products. One of my dreams is build a PVR that lets me cut commercials out of my recorded shows and interject ones favorites I've downloaded or 'clipped out'.
If you can't advertise without annoying me, then it doesn't matter where your ad is placed, you have already lost.
Can ads in games be done without annoying people or boring them? I'm certain they can. I'll applaud those for their ingenuity and boo the rest for their idiocy.
It isn't ads in games you should be caring about, it's crappy ads anywhere.
"A recent patch to SWAT 4 introduces dynamic in-game advertising in the form of randomly generated posters on walls in the game. Provided by Massive, Inc., the game downloads new ads each time the game is loaded. "
Isn't this game single player? Has anyone played it? What happens if yo disable your internet connection before you start the game?
At what point do you just stop consuming? This push and pull between advertisers/marketers and human beings (yes, Virginia, there is a difference) is like a game of tic-tac-toe. The only way to win is not to play (consume).
I wonder how long it will be before we also start getting "ENLARGE YOUR PENIS..." spam in-game, in addition to the (not-yet-pop-up) advertisements.
I remember back when subspace was dying and we were hoping to save it, none of us would have really minded the presence of in game advertising a whole lot. I mean advertising can be a good thing if it offsets your costs, but where do we draw the line? The main problem with advertising as a slippery slope in video games is that it's a very, very attractive slippery slope.
People who play games where advertising is targeted (Anarchy Online, planetside, etc.) spend massive amounts of time playing these games in some circumstances. In fact, advertising through these games might be the only way someone can reach that particular consumer.
Imagine, if you will, the MMO as a massive content channel; In this alternate reality, Vivendi Universal (who owns blizzard, as well as a few record labels) starts putting 'limited' singles into World of Warcraft whenever you fight Ragnaros-- Can you turn off Queens of the Stone age so you can listen to freaking team speak? Who knows.
Let's say that as a method of tricking us, the gold fee for re-specing is removed if you [b]watch this short advertisement![/b] Now you're actually paying the consumer pennies to watch your ad, albeit virtual pennies.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
Gamertag: WyleType