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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.
If it has gotten to the point that ads are expected and feel 'right' in a video game, then the marketeers have won.
ADs are not 'right' in any context, especially when you are paying for the product.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Usually a nice cheese ;)
Bark less. Wag more.
Dear God, not again!
Luckily I had a helpful error box pop up and only had to pay $19.95 (plus VA 4.5% sales tax) to stop this heinous security oversight that is present in EVERY operating system on the Internet!
I find advertising pretty off-putting in the real world too. Just another reason to stay in the basement...
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
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.
I don't mind in-game ads, as long as they're inobtrusive.
I do mind giving EA and Flagship blanket permission to examine everything on my computer. READ what their "agreement" says -- they can mine your computer for whatever data they want, and give/sell it to whomever pays for it.
I keep sensitive business data, covered by NDAs, on my computer; I don't want anonymous strangers mining through my music, documents, source code, and data. Quite simply, the Hellgate: London agreement is completely unreasonable and dangerous.
Anyone who supports Free Software should understand the principles involved here, and refuse to accept Hellgate London on their computer.
All about me
It's a game, not the apocalypse or big brother or anything. If you use this scaremongering long enough it will lose all meaning and when the day comes that it gets nasty, nobody will believe you.
Don't cry wolf if there's no wolf around.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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.
Just like how there are no ads on cable TV, right?
It's not that big a deal. Subways with bare walls would be very odd. Extremly odd and not even close to realistic. So you have a game whose environment includes add ridden subways (just like in real life). Now the developer has to ask a question: Which adds do we display in the subways? You can choose at random or you can do what the subways do: whoever pays.
If, for the sake of realism, you have to put adds in the subway stations, why not make money off of it? The game experience is the same, the only difference is instead of seeing "Moca Mola" and "Nickers" adds you see the same ones your used to in real subways (Coca Cola and Snickers).
Now if we started seeing the "Legendary Snicker Hammer of Pwnage" and the "Coca Cola Champion's Sword" I'd be put off....but this isn't the case at all.
That was what I was wondering. People do have differing standards, but it would be nice to see a few screen shots. It does make a huge difference if the ads look appropriate to the environment.
I wouldn't mind necessarily playing a race car simulation which included advertisements pretty much everywhere, for the reason that real races will have tons of advertisements everywhere. Just don't take the intrusive information that isn't related and do lower the price on the game by using the advertising revenue to subsidize it.
Perhaps use some of the revenue to release extra content for the game.
But overall, I do have to say that in game ads are tacky in most situations. When I play games, I play them to leave reality, not to be more available to the advertisers I'm trying to ignore.
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!
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
I'm in the beta, and the NDA just lifted yesterday, so here are some screenshots. The ads are very unobtrusive. The game takes place in London, 2038, after hellgates have opened and demons have killed 99% of the people on the earth. So, having posters appear on the walls of dirty, blasted out subway tunnel walls fits in very well with the theme of the game. The posters are so dingy you can barely read them unless you look close, and it matches the post-apocalyptic feel of the game to see ads from the "past." Judge for yourself:
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
As far as the gameplay goes? This game totally rocks! Imagine if Diablo and Half-Life 2 had a baby. A demon and zombie infested, mutant loot pinata of a baby... Basically, you can hack and slash if you want to, pew-pew with spells if you want to, or shoot guns like an FPS if you want to. It's Diablo in full 3d, by Bill Roper and most of the guys from Blizzard North that created Diablo 1 and 2. There is single player and online multi-player. The online multi-player is instanced like Guild Wars, where only the towns are public. It's one hell of a lot of fun, and completely addictive, just like the original Diablos were. Imagine Diablo with full 3d, a physics engine, and exploding barrels ala HL2.
I think you're going to be hearing a lot of good things about this game.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
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.
My problems are as follows.
- The ads, at least those in the demo, don't fit at all. I saw a faded ad for some movie to be released in 2032, which was fine. What wasn't was the nVidia ad right next to it. It was very obviously anachronistic and, frankly, utter bullshit.
- This software is a bit too invasive. Read your software and hardware configuration? Fuck you. If you're only monitoring what I do in-game and how long I look at each, that's fine. But the instant you start looking at things outside the nice sandbox of your game, you have crossed the line. Fuck off and leave me alone.
- They're already making extra money! If you want the extra features and content, you need to pay a monthly fee! And now they're trying to turn our eyeballs into checks? Choose one or the other, not both! If you're going to charge a monthly fee for parts of your game, don't force advertising on your customers! And if you're going to force advertising on your customers, you damn well better give them all the content you have for free.
This is such bullshit. While in-game advertising doesn't have to suck, EA seems intent on ensuring that it does.I own itburns.net. What should I put there?
Maybe it's my monitor, but those screenshots are so dark I can't even see the ads if I squint and look real hard. I even closed the blinds and I still can't see them.
I'd find it amusing if you have to purchase the box and pay $10 a month to have ads in your game.
As far as I'm concerned, this nullifies any right you have to bitch about draconian returns policies or lousy customer service. It's this sort of behaviour that probably led to the killing off of more reasonable store return policies (if not the stores themselves) and encouraged- and justified- the proliferation of those that treat their customers like assholes.
People like you are the reason that we're not living in that "dream world" any more. (**) God spoke to me. If I was God, I'd have called you an asshole.
(*) Yeah, I'm waiting for a self-justifying whine along the lines of "they could re-sell it". Like it should be their problem to re-sell your secondhand crap in exchange for "returning" your money that they never received in the first place.
(**) Pre-empt #2; Yes, everyone else was doing it too, and it wouldn't have made any difference what you did as an individual. Whatever.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I decided to formalize my curiosity and create a survey. Thank you for your participation. I'll post results back here at some point.
Click Here to take survey
If EA was actually putting those ads "because it adds to realism", there would be an OPTION to disable the ads in-game. This is like everything corporate. Give them your hand, they will take your arm. This is only the beginning...
perception is reality
I never understood why advertisers and publishers want to slow down the servers with ads when they could instead host low ping servers (relatively low cost/ month). Many games let clans put up an image in the loading screen, so why not have the advertiser pay for the price of hosting the server and just put a banner ad in the loading screen? Instead of being an ingame nuisance, they could turn it into a positive.
The ads are streamed by Massive, a Microsoft advertising company.
They are easy to block, as Massive is used to stream the ads that are shown to free players in Anarchy Online. I added the Massive servers/ip addresses to Peerguardian 2 in order to block them. Play the free version of AO all the time with not one commercial/advertisement. In fact, here ya go:
madserver.net:38.119.38.151
ad.madserver.net:38.119.38.151
imp.madserver.net:38.119.38.153
media.madserver.net:38.119.38.152
Block those, and AO is ad free. The same can be done for any EA game or any game using Massive for their advertisements.
"Perhaps use some of the revenue to release extra content for the game."
More revenue means more profit, not more "stuff" for the buyer. Your transaction is done.
Put yourself in EA's shoes. Anyway they can make more profit they'll do it. They'll kill kittens, throw your mother in jail, do whatever it takes to make more money.
Most games are mediocre. They're not horrible, they'll kill an afternoon or 3 with some fun. But they're pretty unmemorable. So you can go to Eletronic Gaming Stop and buy the latest mediocre game for $60. By the same token, hardly any gamers have played more than a handful of titles. For most gamers on a system, there are probably dozens of really good games that are a little older. I'm always curious why people won't just buy a used copy of a 1-2 year old game for 1/3 to 1/2 the price of new and actually have fun.
Now the game stores try to convince you that you should trade in your "good" old game for $5-10 which dries up supply, but it seems to me that there's always a way to get good 18 month old games for about $15-20, which is a way better deal than buying the latest bunch of junk from EA (for example). If you know an avid gamer, let him know you'll give $15 for any game he/she wants to get rid of and you'll build a library of good games for a fraction of what it costs new.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
For anyone who's interested in blocking ingame advertising, I'm sure it will end up being a rapidly changing arms race as usual, but for the moment, blocking the following IP ranges is sufficient to kill updated advertising and privacy-invading "impressions" tracking from both of the major ad providers (IGA Worldwide and Massive Inc)
38.119.38.0/24 (Massive Inc)
65.55.179.0/24 (Massive Inc)
72.3.184.144/28 (IGA)
72.32.5.0/28 (IGA)
Massive does lookups on the domain madserver.net (imp.madserver.net, media.madserver.net, z.madserver.net, etc ad nauseum) to get its IP addresses, whereas IGA seems to use hardcoded IPs (there is no reverse-lookup for them either, although they are hosted by rackspace)
The massive blocks are enough to block advertising and impressions data for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as SWAT4 and does not seem to have any effect on gameplay. They have been confirmed with tcpdump. The only other network activity (besides multiplayer) are simply checking for updates and registering with the master multiplayer servers at
demonware.net.
I am not so sure about the IGA blocks, that's mostly just information from forum posts, since I don't have Battlefield 2142 there's not much I can do to test it. Your milage may vary.
Random and weird software I've written.
I'm also in the beta. The ads are in a lot of places in the town areas.. plastered would probably be an accurate way of describing it.. they're not, however, intrusive. In fact, despite the fact that they're everywhere, i found myself actually looking at them the other day trying to work out what the hell they were for.. They fit the art style quite well, they're dirty, deliberately pretty hard to see and even harder to read..
If it wasn't for the fact that the EULA seems to say that they can survey whatever system i run it on and collect the results (and if it didn't have bad memory leaks) i'd have no problem with this game at all.
Really, it's a pretty fun game too, assuming your favorite part of diablo wasn't the clicking...
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
That said, there ARE ads in the game, but contrary to popular belief, the ads DO NOT appear after you leave the stations (read: towns). Unlike the Battlefield 2 ads, which were over sized and overly bright in many cases, the ads in Hellgate look like they've been covered in several layers of dirt from sheer disrepair. The ads in Hellgate are roughly the same size as a standard promotional movie poster and not obvious at all. Its not unheard of to find a beta player who simply never noticed them either because their graphics are turned down or because they don't spend much time in town, no thanks to the sheer lack of lighting in some portions.