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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."
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...
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!
Google is a free service paid for by well defined ads. Something that you already buy should not contain ads.
Magazine ads pissed me off so much that I now buy no magazine that contains ads. I don't buy many magazines.
If you remember, cable tv (around 1978) was originally completely ad-free. The reasoning was that the content was paid for by your subscription.
Sure, the remote controls had wires and an unfriendly slide switch, but hey -- we got cheesey pron.
And... then came along the concept of cable networks thanks to Ted Turner et. al.
Now, we PAY to get commercials on content that we already PAY for.
This is no new rant, however, it seemed appropriate to bring it up again in this context.
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
Coming from a person who happens to work at a movie theater, I can say, that without the advertising, the overpriced snacks and the trailers, you wouldn't have a theater to watch movies at.
At my theater, the cost of two adult tickets would be $18, coupled with the #2 combo (2 medium drinks and a medium popcorn) for $11.75, just over $20 sounds like a bargain! Movie theaters are expensive to run, and unless they have snacks, at high prices, and advertising to get people to buy said snacks, they would go out of buisness.
Here is an article that explains it fairly well. When you go to a movie, you are going to a candy store, that just happens to be showing movies.