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."

Comments

Wait, I don't get it...

[PSXer]

How do the three options "unlikely" "indifferent", and "likely" make any sense?

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!

Stop-And-Watch

[foundme]

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.

Re:Stop-And-Watch

[Lord_Dweomer]

Very correct. As an ad exec AND a passionate gamer I've been following this very closely. For the most part, advertisers and the facilitating media company that most of them use for this (Massive Inc.) "get it". They know they have to walk on eggshells when it comes to this new media. But then you get stuff like that boxing game on the Xbox360 where you fight the BK King etc. That is going WAAAY too far.

I've done a writeup on this very story topic on my site which you can read here at The Halting Point and you can read the original Slashdot post that I made that sparked my writing of that piece.

While I'd very much so appreciate the clicks, (even though I've made all of .07 through adsense!), to sum it up for those who don't want to make the jump....there are several levels of in-game advertising in terms of invasiveness. And you can view it as a spectrum. On the far left you have extremely uninvasive and even welcome additions such as sponsorship logos in Gran Turismo. It fits with the game world since the game world is simulating reality and they are expected in that type of game.

Then you have things like billboards in MMOs like Anarchy Online and City of Heroes that, while appropriate for the setting (a city with billboards), still annoy you a bit because its trying to transplant culture from one world (reality) into a made up world where those companies do not exist.

Then you have your extremely invasive product placement with crap like what Sprite pulled in the Matrix game, or what McDonalds pulled in The Sims Online. That is the stuff that pisses off gamers because it is a blatent slap in the face. It doesn't add ANYTHING to the game and in fact detracts from it...all that for $60.

The interesting thing is how advertisers are trying to work their way into some of the more dominant games where the majority of titles are fantasy based like WoW. In my story I wrote a bit about possible ideas for working product placement into those worlds, but it requires advertisers to be able to have the balls to poke some fun at themselves, which I doubt they'd ever do.

Honestly...in-game advertising is only going to get more abundant. Whether it becomes worse or not (ala the intraweb) depends on the so-called "gate-keepers" of the games who will have the final say over how much of a sell out they want their game to be.

I'd expect more corporate sponsored guilds and guild events, more added material (like the CS map Subway made), and other new things we haven't considered.

If it gets to the point though where the games are starting to majorly sacrifice playability and content for ad revenue though, customers will complain and run for the nearest competitor.

Missing Result

[HunterZ]

They also forgot to mention that 87% of statistics are made up.

I care...!

[__aaclcg7560]

As long I can shoot up, blow up, or burn up the ads in game. I care *very* much for in game ads.

Re:15% is not such a small amount...

[sharkb8]

It's a pure numbers play. If a game company estaimates that 15% of gamers will not buy a game because of ads, will the ad revenue make up for the 15% loss in sales?

In other words, will putting ads in a game make more money? I assume it does, becasue we see more and more ads in games.

Arguably, even the 15% or gamers who wouldn't play a game with ads wouldn't find out that there were ads in the game, or that the ads bothered them until after they bought the game. You think Best Buy's going to give a refund because someone doesn't like the graphics?

Besides, if a gamer wants a game as realistic as possbile, there should be MORE advertising in games, just like in the real world.

Skewed survey

[Aim Here]

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.

Re:Ignored?

[corsec67]

heh, like the following hypothetical conversation in a mmorpg?

  Get ready to attack!
  OK.
  Did I mention that Mountain Dew is refreshing?
  WTF!?
  I didn't say anything

In Game Ads

[TacNuke]

I for one, dont care about in-gadrink pepsime ads

This is Bollocks.

[Lave]

Disclaimer - this post includes angry fucking retoric, and swearing with an english slant

I hate the way that these advertising arseholes have found an untapped niche, where people relax away from the fucking stressful world and realised they can rape it of it's innocence and beauty in exchange for a quick buck. It isn't ok and it isn't right.

The marketing dickshits are currently at step 2 of their plan. The stage where they tell us all we are ok with what they want to do - to soften us up for when they fuck over our games. I would bet a large amount of money these are rigged surveys. Or at least the ones that give you options like:

If games contained advertising then would you:

a) stop buying games altogether

b) Buy more games than ever before.

If you saw a product advertised in a game then would you:

a) Buy it

b)Kill yourself

And don't just think you can just play nice fantasy and sci-fi games that avoid this advertising. You won't. Those games will dramaticcally fall in production when the industry realises that without the advertising revune these projects ar emuch less rewarding.

Oh and I know how games with no loading screens are really important to you. But your fucked. They will have no incentive to decrease load times when they use them as billboards. If anything they will increase.

Give me the game or free and I haven't a problem with ads. But if I buy the fucking thing with my own fucking money then I bought the right to have a few beautiful hours of my life sans adverts for fucking once. (like how slashdot works). There is no in between. If your business can't support those revenue models there is something fundamentally wrong with what you are doin and no amount of advertising will save you.

Re:Is it just me..

[Monkelectric]

I don't buy DVDs that have no ads, period

Is there some resource to find out *WHICH* DVDs have advertisements before you buy them? I seem to find out afterwords. I am *INCREDIBLY* pissed about the Season 2 Dead Like Me box set having a two minute unskippable anti-piracy advert, *ON EVERY DISC*. You just paid 50$ for a box set and they're reminding you not to pirate it. From now on I pirate anything with an advert.

Then you're a rare breed

[Moraelin]

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.