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Gamers Don't Care About In-Game Ads
Next Generation reports on a study indicating that, on the whole, gamers are fine with in-game ads. From the article: "According to the study, 15 percent of heavy gamers are 'unlikely' to play a game that utilizes in-game ads, but one-third said they are 'likely' to play games with ads, while 52 percent said it makes no difference. Also among heavy gamers, 17 percent said ads would actually make them consider buying the advertised products, but only 9 percent of light/medium gamers would do the same."
Sure, if you were avoiding games with ads altogether, "unlikely" might be an option. Or maybe it just means that a lot of games don't have ads in the first place so you're unlikely to play a game that has ads.
Does "likely" really mean that you'd specifically seek out games with ads, or that you play a lot of games and are likely to run into a couple that have ads?
As for "indifferent", why is that a choice? How does the fact that you don't care either way about ads have anything to do with the fact that you're likely or unlikely to play a game with ads? It's not like games have a switch, "ads" or "no ads". You play whichever game you want to, and if it happens to have ads, you're "likely" to play a game with ads!
As long as it doesn't require me to stop and watch the ad, I don't think in-game ad is anything but a subliminal background noise.
For example, I don't mind constantly seeing the terrorists smoking xx-brand of cigaratte, but if my GhostRecon team has to stop every 5 minutes and gather around to have a smokey, I will be pissed.
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Of course this is only a survey of people who are so advertiser friendly as to sit and tell a bunch of market researchers what they think. People who strongly dislike advertising are no doubt fairly strongly inclined towards telling those market researchers to fuck off instead of giving free clues as to how to target their insidious mindraping propaganda more efficiently. I know I am.
Based on some media studies I read in university sociology courses (~ 10 years ago), the aggregate effect long term of advertising is most important.
.something we don't need. But most retail advertising is more subtle, with more modest expectations. They want to establish brand conciousness, the need will come later.
We all know that advertising for high-end products are to plant a 'need' -- thing cars, drug companies, etc..
Example: I need to buy toothpaste. I go to the store, and see 10-20 brands. OMG how do I make a decision!?! Oh thank goodness, Crest/Aquafresh/Colgate is there...i'll take that reliable, dependable brand name.
Most people of Gen-X or later are cynical enough to 'tune out' advertising and recognise it for what it is. However, when given a choice, we'll still take Coke over RC Cola, Tide over Generic Brand, or Sony over Chinageneric.
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Will the best-loved games of the next decade contain in-game ads? How would Tolkien have reacted if his mythology had been required to include products and services from the real world? If, instead of pulling out lembas bread in the movie, would it have been better if Sam would have pulled out Go-GURT® brand Yogurt? I can't help but think that product placements mar otherwise highly-polished stories.
Frankly I don't mind ads as long as they don't distract from the game environment. If I walk past an ad in the game and it starts making noises or the overall content doesn't really fit the game, it bugs me. I've been playing PlanetSide since it came out and they added the in-game ads a little while ago. I actually have them blocked because they annoyed me so much.
The basic problem with the ads was three things:
1) Some ads were intrusive, making loud noises, etc
2) Almost all the ads didn't fit into the context of the game
3) I was still paying $13/month for the game AND getting ads
To can't say I'd reject a game outright based on ads, but it's all a matter of context. The game will have to have that much more to offer or be cheaper because of them. Also, I'm really not cool with the notion of paying a monthly fee then having to see ads on top of that.
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That's not really product placement, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had to pay Greddy to use their name and logo. Now if Greddy was the only brand of turbocharger you could buy in the game (look at Need For Speed: Most Wanted, for example), that would be product placement. In GT4, it's "realism". Perhaps only Greddy supplies a turbo for the car you're trying to modify, so the only turbo you can buy is a Greddy. Modify another car and you may have a choice of different brands, or Greddy may not even make an appropriate turbo so they're not listed.
The same is true for the cars. It's not product placement to be able to drive a Honda Civic or a Ford Mustang. It's "realism", and Polyphony Digital paid for a license to use those cars. If you were playing Ford Racing 3, that's advertising. Ford paid to have that game made using only Ford products. And it's not just cars and car parts. Real-life tracks in games like Gran Turismo have the same problem of advertising vs. licensing. Polyphony Digital can't just go and take pictures of the track and use them for textures, because those textures may contain real ads that PD doesn't have the rights to use. If they want to use all of the same ads as the real life track, they're going to have to go to each advertiser and try to get the rights (either convince the company to pay for the ad space in the game, which they probably won't go for, or pay the company a licensing fee to use their already-existing advertising). That's why you'll see a lot of "placeholder" ads with stuff like "Sony" or "GT" on them (or "Microsoft" or "Xbox" in the case of Forza), because they couldn't get the rights to display the real ads. In this case, though the ads are still advertisements in the real world, they're not advertisements in-game. If Polyphony Digital or Turn 10 (the Forza developers) took the EA route, they'd just replace all real-world ads with the ads of companies who paid them. You'd get to race at "Burger King Laguna Seca" instead of "Mazda Laguna Seca", and that would just suck.
Well, maybe _you_ realize the value of being subtle and respecting the (potential) customer, but, well, look at internet advertising. (Which in all fairness you do mention.) There the fucktards won the game, so to speak.
;)
It started decent enough there too. Most sites had one small banner on the first page. Nothing in-your face, nothing insisting to stay on top of the text you're trying to read, no fake UIs, etc. Where that ended, well, you know that already.
Maybe _you_ realize what's wrong with that, but there are plenty of psychopaths which basically don't care. They don't even care if it actually helps their paying client sell more products, as long as at the end of the day they have their smoke-and-mirrors "we produced X thousand clicks" statistics.
And belief in "they'll realize the customers won't stand for that" is, no offense, wishful thinking at best. We used to think that about Internet ads too. If you took anyone from the early 90's and told them that 10-15 years later ads would be full-screen animated layers in front of the actual content, extra pages with FMV ads each time you click on a link to an article, etc, they would have said the same. "What? The users will never stand for that kind of thing, and the ad providers know it!! People would stop going to that web site!!" It didn't quite work that way, did it?
Yeah, I'm bitter, but I prefer to think of it as "grapefruit flavoured"
And if you still think games are immune to that, I have an example where it did already happen. At one point I decided to give Planetside another try. Guess what I was treated to, after it downloaded all the patches? A whole fscking FMV ad for their other planned expansion packs, and I wasn't allowed to skip it either. I found it outraging. Not only it wasted my time with the huge ad itself, but it wasted my time to download it as part of a "patch". But I guess the marketroid that came up with that couldn't care less.
So at least at one company (Sony), the marketting guys/girls were already able to impose that kind of a heavy-handed slap in the paying customer's face.
And here's what else I can see coming and I'm definitely not looking forward to:
- heavy-handed blatantly-in-your-face advertising that breaks any suspension of disbelief. (E.g., I can live with having Coca Cola machines and bars selling Coca Cola all over the place, but if they go and make Coca Cola be the mana potions and work some blatant advertisment quests into the main line... well, there goes suspension of disbelief right there. Sorry, there's _no_ way I could take such a universe seriously. Maybe as a parody, but not seriously. E.g., I can live with Yahoo! ads on billboards, but don't freaking go and change my PSO Mag into a floating ad banner for Yahoo! like Sega did. That was one subscription cancelled right there and then.)
- ad providers insisting that all ads are non-cacheable and loaded directly off their servers, so they can personally count the number of hits. See web pages everywhere which would load in 1 second otherwise, but end up taking 10 seconds to load because of the ads. I'm _not_ looking forward to seeing the same effect on games' level load times.
- publishers starting to accept or reject games and settings not based on their merits, but on how suited they are for in-game advertising. E.g., rejecting a great game like Jade Empire just because Coca Cola ads would look out of place in it.
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