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Are Optional Ads Worth The Trouble?
azuredrake writes "NCSoft's City of Heroes has just announced that in-game ads are being added to the game, provided by an advertising firm Double Fusion. However, unlike in many games, the ads being brought to CoH have been defined as 'always optional'. The publishers see the ads as a purely additional revenue stream, not as something that will ever allow advertisers to affect game content. Commentary is available at Gamasutra. Is making advertisement volunteer-based a viable way to get around cynicism? The tone of these ads seems to be 'check them out to help the game'. Are there any sites or services in which you'd voluntarily look at ads to lend a hand? "
If the ads are low-key, then they don't really bother me. So why shouldn't I help a company I like make a little extra money?
Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Study hard. Be evil.
Is if any advertisers end up being specific to hero-side or villain-side.
Microsoft as a loyal supporter of Lord Recluse, perhaps?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
A game that has modern day cities in it can appropriately have advertisements on it, just like most racing games now a days. In someways it helps because it makes it feel like a real city. Now if I started seeing signs for Vitamin Water on World of Warcraft, that is when I get offended.
After all, in many games there are places where ads would be appropriate. For example if you have a TV, rather than just having the TV displaying some image loop, it could display ads. Wouldn't be that different from a real TV.
To work though they have to be unobtrusive. They have to be something that is just a part of the environment, and in a natural way. If they get in the way, then it is not good. That's the real problem is that advertisers seem to think that ads need to be more in your face, stop you from what you are doing to work. Well that isn't acceptable. I will not play a game where I have to sit through an ad to log in.
I think this is pretty easy to predict. Basically, a significant percentage of people will "opt-out". Enough so that they will eventually remove the opt-out choice. At which point, a critical mass of people will be miffed enough that they will just cancel membership. And their net revenue will be a significant percentage less than it is right now before they introduced this ridiculous scheme.
I mean seriously. If they even have to consider alternate revenue streams that are so obviously risky, it pretty much is the writing on the wall for the game, is it not?
But then again, I know people in marketing that are under the complete and utter idiotic delusion that people LIKE and WANT advertising. Self delusion never fails to amaze me.
I've white listed a number of sites on adblock for a while that I felt like supporting. However it meant white listing well known ad servers, so that meant I was seeing them on other sites as well. I've tried surfing without any ad blocking for a while, but that's not a workable solution. I'd be reading some article on a site with a BLINK BLINK FLASH MOVE MOVE ad besides it. It doesn't make for an easy read.
Never mind the sites that *shouts* SUDDENLY ADD SOUND to a page while you're quietly trying to read an article at work.
In the end, I've gone back to just adblocking the hell out of everything, I've tried, and some sites are good with it, but the majority of other sites ruin it for those that try to play nice.
We need, Google to start a competitor to Paypal, so I can donate some small amounts of money to the sites I like. (I don't use Paypal, because they're a bunch of crooks)
But that's just me, I loathe advertising in any form. I'm never a good target for it.
Optional advertising is a great idea; it filters out the people that will be offended by it (and who will attribute that offence both to the advertising venue and the advertiser). Everyone wins, the venue doesn't offend it's patrons, the advertiser only gets it's message out to receptive listeners, and people aren't offended.
Unless the process of inserting the ad capability into the game threatens to cost more than the ads will pay, I see it as something of a no-loss proposition for the games maker. If a player doesn't mind, then you've got an extra revenue stream ... and if they do then they can just turn it off. It's something kinda hard to knock from my (somewhat cynical) point of view.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
So now they'll give in-game advertising a try. It's optional, you know - for now. If this proves to be something that brings in additional revenue the game developers will make it mandatory without a second thought.
It's just a small step past selling their customer lists to marketing firms. You didn't think that registration was so they could send you a birthday card, did you?
In general, if ads are useful, targeted, and reasonably unobtrusive, I welcome them as a source of information.
For instance, if a site wants to advertise (based on a search for robotics-related documents) that they have a good deal on stepper motors, great. I might well click through and find something I'd like. Amazon does a great job with this as far as books go -- their recommendations of what else I'd like often come up with some really cool suggestions.
What I don't want to see are ads for the general public (or even the general gamer public). Even if such a beast as a typical gamer exists, it ain't me. My taste in ads is somewhat like my taste in music -- I don't expect anyone else to like the exact mix I do (and most people's tastes will be pretty different. I admit I'm weird.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Someone else responded to this in a rather clear and efficient way:
YOU ALREADY HAVE TO PAY A FUCKING MONTHLY FEE!
And isn't that why the ads are optional?? To me this is kind of like DVDs that don't force you to watch previews from other movies but gives you the option to under the Extras menu. You paid for the DVD so it shouldn't interfere with your movie experience but I see no harm is just having an option. If the ads are targeted well enough they might even be beneficial to you as well. Those previews of other movies on the DVD have led me to find other movies I've liked.
If anybody would it would be wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia They have a whole section insulting theirselves...
It depends on the publisher, I suppose, but in-game ads aren't all greedy. To make a high quality MMORPG (like CoH) these days, a developer will need to spend millions of dollars over a period of 3-4 years. That's a hard sell to investors. And these game companies aren't out to make just one game.
NCSoft publishes a lot of good, unique games, and if in-game ads will help them publish more good games, I don't have a problem with it.
Well, it depends.
COH happens in a modern day metropolis. Ads and billboards aren't out of place. You kinda expect them there.
In fact, the game already _had_ billboards and posters from day 1, except they were mildly funny parodies instead of actual ads. For example stuff like ads for lawyers getting the villains out of jail after your superhero toon arrests them, or for some fictional in-game companies like Crey Industries, etc.
Replacing an ad for Crey with an ad for Microsoft, wouldn't seem out of place at all. (And doubly so for a lot of us nerds, since the Crey are a major supervillain group in the game;)
Or I wouldn't be even give it a second thought if there was a McDonald's in Galaxy City. I mean they already have fictional restaurants there, with funny names like "El Super Mexicano."
The same can't be said for a lot of other settings and genres, though. E.g., it would feel awfully weird to have billboards for IBM and Coca Cola along the road to Darnassus in WOW.
And that's really what I'm fearing. That it might re-sort genres and settings according to how fit they are for ads.
Remember that we already _had_ such an effect. Adventure games were still popular games, and that market was actually _growing_ when everyone dropped them like a hot potato in the 90's. Why? Because making a simplistic FPS was _much_ cheaper. Even if you sold less copies than an adventure, you'd still make more profit.
I can see "games fit for ads" vs "games where ads look out of place" repeating that history.
Adventures eventually made a comeback, because, basically, people eventually came to expect the same level of scripting and animations in a FPS as in an adventure. So the price difference vanished.
The same might never happen in the case of "games fit for ads" vs "games where ads look out of place." Already all else is equal. Only one of them can get more money. Short of advertisers pulling out, it stays that way.
So I fear that we _might_ slide towards every game happening in a city, or a race-track, or along of big billboard-overdosed highway. And that doesn't sound too great.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I have never in my life clicked on an ad I have found on a website to purchase an item. And the 'ad bubble' will fall, which is why I find it funny that people seem to cling to it.
It's an empty revenue stream. Do you think advertisements on a website really sell a product more? Honestly not. I know of nobody that pays attention to them. Even moreso when the ad is in your face like "CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE ONE THIS!" or "HERE HAVE A SEIZURE WHILE TRYING TO HIT THIS MONKEY!"
Where the real revenue stream will come from is having solid content that people are willing to pay for. People don't buy from newegg because they see newegg adverts smeered all over the place. In fact, newegg doesn't even advertise on TV (though they might have a few times but it's not generally known to the public) yet they make so much money.
Back to the topic at hand, though. Simple fact:
1. I will never buy a product I see in a video game.
2. I don't want a video game wasting my bandwidth and gaming cycles to load an advertisement dynamically while I'm trying to frag someone because I'm never going to buy the stupid item in the first place.
3. I'd rather my games and fantasy worlds use "joke" versions of popular brands because it makes them funnier, laughing at some of the ways they label brands (Youtoob in South Park vs. Youtube).
I'm also that guy that walks into Best Buy that knows what he wants and is in and out. I don't buy their replacement plans, I don't buy their 5000 accessories. I want an item and I want just what I want.
and their blatant sales pitch about Loom.
:)
It was funny
Perhaps they could divide up advertising revenue or a portion of the revenue amongst all of the players viewing advertisements to reduce the monthly subscription fee. So in the end players are "paying" the same amount. The more people viewing the ads, the greater the overall revenue, and perhaps more people would subscribe to playing
No. Not a single one. In fact, I would (and do) take time, effort and money to configure my computer to specifically exclude such wastes of my paid-for bandwidth.
I have at least three spam filters (ISP, home mail server, POP client) on my email.
I have ISP and personal spam filters on my Usenet feed.
I have multiple regex blocks applicable to my browsers, 99% targetted at in-page advertising.
And hey, my bandwidth use has dropped into a cheaper bracket. So not only am I unperturbed by advertisements for crap on the other side of the world, I save money.
To advertisers: I already follow fifty-seven news feeds, including multiple ones about new products in areas of personal interest. If I'm not buying your product, it's because either I don't want it, or I don't consider the product list of your particular industry niche to be worth my time. If I ever want to buy something in that niche, I will go do research on it at that time.
And guess what - if there's an entire product niche that I don't know about, and have never even heard a whisper or hint about from family, friends or blogs, there's a fairly good chance that I don't freakin' need any product in that niche.
If and when I get or build a PVR-alike, it will be set to delete or block ads. I already don't watch live TV any more. I prefer DVD players which can skip the pre-main-menu crap and any trailers/ads, too. I don't buy newspapers, and if there was a way to get the free local ones on paper with the ads removed, I'd be looking into it.
"Pull" advertising I don't mind. If I go specifically looking for a product, then by all means try and sell it to me. But any form of "push" advertising irritates the hell out of me.
The intended purpose of advertising is to influence the viewer's opinion, to create bias towards specific brands or products regardless of whether there be any basis in fact for such a bias.
The intended purpose of Wikipedia is to inform without opinion, without bias. (hey, I DID say "intended"!). To expose facts alone, un-colored by opinion.
To me it seems that this makes advertising on Wikipedia innappropriate.
Alli
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Unless we see small design/PR firms emerging, whose proposed service is to make custom ads that fit the game's world atmosphere.
Say that McDonalds want to put an add into COH. Instead of copy pasting some (dull) real life add that won't work in the general atmosphere of the game, they hire such a design company which will create a humorous and twisted variation, that will make the player laugh. Thus fitting better in the global game atmosphere AND attracting more eyeballs to the add (because they are genuinely fun to watch).
Same reflection could be done for fantasy oriented games. A copy-pasted Coke add will just suck. A redesigned message on a scroll, touting the virtue of "ye olde Coke's potion of +1 awakeness. (As of today with even less "-1 charisma" calories)" together with a painting of some troll posing in a similar way as the pretty models on the real-life ads, will sound funny.
In fact during the era when sharewares where big in the 90s, there were a lot of companies pulling similar parodies of modern product into out-of place environment (fantasy, etc.), just for the fun of it. Now just imagine the money they could have earned if, instead of changing the name to avoid trademark infringements, they actually used the real names with the blessing of the companies parodied ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
http://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/
rather annoyingly firefox beta5 isn't compatible with the mainstream release of adblock however the development build here works fine.
All i need now is a method to remove the gray tramlines running down the page on slashdot. the nesting soon reduces me to 20% width comment 20% side bar 60% tram line. god knows what mobile users get.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I think it would make a fun daily quest to have one of them be to just fly around Shattrath carrying an ad banner behind you.
That would be the best of both worlds. Don't look up if you don't like in-game ads and if you don't care, do the daily.
I suppose for this to really work, it would have to be possible for both Alliance and Horde to shoot you down while you're advertising. That sounds like fun, actually.
Presumably in-game ads like this aren't going to measure performance by click rates, since clicking would take you out of the game. They may measure it by camera focus time (ie, if the ad occupies at least 25% of the screen for 10 or more seconds).
I echo the GP sentiment. If the game I enjoy is having financial trouble, my reading ads contributes to their ability to remain in business, which in turn contributes to my ability to continue to play. I would stay opted in for as long as the ads were not obnoxious. It would not take many annoying ads for me to opt out though, and if opting out was no longer an option, it would not take many annoying ads to make me cancel my subscription.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!