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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? "
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.
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.
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?
because you're already paid for the client AND for a monthly subscription? I mean if it was something like Guild Wars, where it was free...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Buying the game and paying the monthly fee means you get to play the game. That's it. It doesn't give you anything beyond that. You don't own part of the company because you pay a monthly fee, you don't get to break the rules whenever you want because you pay a monthly fee, and you don't get to decide what the company does to bring in extra revenue because you pay a monthly fee.
If you find it annoying, opt out.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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.
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.
"Buying the game and paying the monthly fee means you get to play the game. That's it"
The whole 'liscensing' and 'software as a service' is quite a scam anyway, if I'm paying for a product I don't want to see ads. I'd like to have some time and place where I do not have ads in my face. Games is one of the few mediums that ads have not yet penetrated. We see enough ads in our daily lives, on the way to/from wherever, etc, etc?
If I'm voting for a product with my dollars and I am a customer they better damn well listen, I think the optional ads is a good thing in that those of us who don't want to have it shoved down our throat get to opt out of it but I know I'm not the only one tired of being haggled for cash 24/7.
The thing is that even if half the players filter out the ads, even if no real game content is changed, even if it's just a few changed textures... the company is now beholden to two masters: the players and the advertisers. The advertising companies are going to be saying to them: "We want you to promote X, Y, and Z, and we're going to pull our advertising unless you agree with us on political point Q". We've seen it so many times before, because the advertisers have a much louder and more focussed message, so they usually get what they want. The company goes along with them because they don't really care about any of those things - they just want the money so they can focus on their game - and then you have one more voice supporting the big media companies, throwing their weight behind anti-user movements like Sonny Bono and the DMCA.
Note that none of this is going to happen today. Putting the ads into the game is free. It's 12 months down the line, when all the noise has died down, that the advertising companies come back and say "Now... you've worked all that money into your budget, you depend on it... let's talk about what you're going to do for us". Keeping the ads is far from free.
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 ]