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Hellgate Beta's In-Game Ads Raise Eyebrows
ari wins writes "IGN.com has up a post discussing the new EA/Flagship game Hellgate: London, and the in-game advertisements it includes to facilitate targeted marketing. Though ads in games aren't exactly new, some Beta testers are objecting to their apparently off-putting presence. Users have also noted that accepting the game's EULA means you submit to the collection of 'technical and related information that identifies your computer, including without limitation your Internet Protocol address, operating system, application software and peripheral hardware'."
Now that there's a game out there with targeted marketing, the best way to take it down as well as the financial motivation to do it again is simple (but takes a lot of help):
Buy it, wait a week or so, and return it. Then buy it somewhere else, wait a week or so, and return it. If just 5000 people were to do this 5 times each, it could destroy the percieved marketability, and it would be attributed to targeting issue. Enough people wasting enough time of enough computer stores, and computer stores would be best off not carrying it.
Then the investors / decision makers who committed to this sickness get discliplined / lose money, and new investors get scared to do this again.
I'm not a beta player, and those people are/were under rather heavy NDAs, from what I hear. The demo of the game was released a few days ago, and *that* does indeed have ads in it. (I only noticed an NVidia ad)
Does it say anywhere on the box, "WARNING: This game includes in-game advertising and requires live monitoring of computer information?" Or are there massive amounts of consumers that are going to be shocked to discover that their game requires adware? There's a big difference between "Hey, we warned you" and "Turn around and grab your ankles".
Second question: Anyone know how much this kind of live uploading of advertisements would affect online performance?
If a game costs 50$ why the hell should there be ads in it? Who actually puts up with this enough to even make the idea look like something we would tolerate?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I've been playing the beta for a week now, and even though I knew about the ads before I started playing, I still haven't noticed them at all while playing when I wasn't specifically looking for them. IIRC, they're limited to "stations" where are basically the towns from Diablo 2. Since these are basically subway stations, you expect to see ads there, and they aren't obtrusive at all, so they feel like part of the environment rather than being a jarring experience.
Hellgate is not the game to make an outrage over, because the ads in it are so tastefully done that they feel right.
I never saw ads in Hellgate London demo or the retail version of BF2142. I think it may be because I'm behind a hardware firewall (Linksys WRT54GL, yay).
On the other hand, Hellgate London demo was a real yawner. Very disappointing. Unplayably buggy in the gameplay department (everything else ran smoothly though) - I literally reached a dead end along the linear path that I had to take to get to the next zone and complete the main questline, which I assume upon completion the demo would end. Went back, and could find no alternative path through either of the last two areas on the path.
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Taking bets on weather this will be seen as a reason to make the game "phone home" about what users "look at" in-game ? I'd expect them to track your cursor, camera angles, and zoom at the very least.
This makes sense really, when you consider who is pushing for this:
Electronic Arts.
Yet another reason why I hope they will die a fiery death. I haven't bought an EA game since they bought/shut down GameStorm because "gasp" it competed with "Ultima Online".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The reason you probably never saw the ads is because they're almost impossible to actually see unless you're looking for them. I was playing the beta for several weeks before I realized that the ads on the subway walls were actual ads for real products. They're integrated into the environment and easy to look over.
As for the demo, they really messed up. The beta is less buggy (although still has a couple kinks to work out). They just shouldn't have released the demo at all to be honest.
The laws of probability forbid it!
There actually are some pretty good reasons to put ads in games. In fact, having ads in games (to a point) can be a win/win for both the software company, which gets more money, and the user, who gets more realism. For instance, if you play a game in a city setting, one would expect realistic ads on billboards, bulletin boards, walls, etc (as opposed to crappy old games where you would race cars through a city, for instance, and every billboard would say "Midway!", which got old really quick). And speaking of racing games, what kind of a NASCAR game would you have if there weren't ads plastered all over the cars? I think having ads in a game is great for realism and cost defrayment (maybe you don't need as many people to buy a game for developers to be willing to make it, since they will also get ad money). As long as they put the ads in context within the game, this is a great thing.
Now, I should say I haven't seen this beta so I don't know if they are crossing the line and putting ads out of context. If every third person in a crowd is wearing an NVIDIA shirt, that is out of context and pretty ridiculous. Also, if performance suffers from downloading new ads for the game or something, that is bad too. But if performance doesn't suffer, downloading new ads could be good. After all, billboards, walls, etc change their ads in real life, so why shouldn't a game? That ads realism and variety to the landscape.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
If I don't like ads, I can always just not buy another product from that company. But a "EULA" that says you agree to it transmitting personal information to the company, telling it not just that you bought the game but when you are playing it??? I will pass on that one.
I do not know about game-specific retailers per se, but not one major software retailer in the United States (CompUSA, etc.) will give refunds for opened software. The software companies themselves encouraged that policy "to fight piracy". So statements in shrink-wrap EULAs to the effect that if you don't like the terms you should just return the product are misleading at best. If I were a judge, I would call it outright "fraud" because the software companies are well aware of that situation... they created it!
Cable TV is cheaper than it would be if there were no ads at all.
That's actually not true. Most people don't remember then but when cable first came out to the masses, 90% of the selling point is that you would ONLY get commercials on network broadcast channels. Once they had their foot in the door in most markets, commercials changed over night. Since then, it has been the same old story; lie, lie, lie, raise prices again, just like everyone other monopoly/utility. I seem to recall cable being commercial free for only a year or two, after that they placed commercials like crazy and their prices doubled over the next eight years. This was in the Houston market. Keep in mind, they were profitable when before they had commercials and while they were still rolling out cable in large areas. Think about that for second.
These days people pay inflated prices for channels because we are floating 100-channels no one watches or wants because they are force bundled. In other words, they could drop commercials and stop bundling and prices could stay the same. Some estimates I've read suggest cable company prices could be cut in half and they would still be wildly profitable. Remember, sat TV is only profitable because cable profits are so insanely, unreasonable high. Think about it for a second, you really think the cost of using cable laid over the last 30 years is anything near the cost of launching and maintaining sats in orbit while maintaining a market the fraction the size cable? To boot, sat is often cheaper than cable in many markets while their per install overhead is much, much higher than cable. If that doesn't tell you how insanely over priced cable is, you'll never gasp it.
The version, as you tell it, is what the cable companies preach and it has been fairly well debunked.
I'd find it amusing if you have to purchase the box and pay $10 a month to have ads in your game.
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Click Here to take survey
but when I play a game, I'm usually playing because it's *not* like real life. If I wanted a game that was just like real life, I'd go out side and experience actual real life.
Fighting the demonic hordes is cool. Fighting the demonic hordes in a futuristic setting is cooler. Fighting the demonic hordes in a futuristic setting in my home town is about as cool as it can get. (Although note that I've not played the game yet, it could well suck)
when your game is about demons from hell invading London thirty years in the future, being realistic goes straight out the window
Just because the premise is unrealistic, doesn't mean that the setting has to be. Believe me, the Tube is *covered* with adverts - some stations now even have LCD screens with moving ads playing (thankfully no sound as yet...). Not having adverts in the game would be jarring for those of us who actually use the Tube (or I guess any similar train system) on a daily basis. Kind of like when it rains in Oblivion and the rain goes straight through archways, etc. It's a little thing, but it spoils the realism a bit.
It's official. Most of you are morons.