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Publishers Detail Specific In-Game Ad Plans For Future Games
MTV's Multiplayer Blog recaps a recent event held by Massive Inc., a subsidiary of Microsoft, during which game publishers put forth specific ideas on what types of in-game advertising players will and won't be seeing in the near future. The examples varied in how interactive and intrusive they were, from name-brand bottled water power-ups to destructible virtual billboards to taking advantage of sports game locker rooms for product placement. They did claim they would restrain themselves from blatant advertisements that would ruin immersion in fantasy games. Blizzard partnered with Massive to bring ads to Battle.net, but don't expect to see ads in the associated games.
What if they lowered price on an ad-supported version of a game. Say a new fps game set in a city. There is billboards and stores and stuff you can see, if you pay full price for the game this is all for made up stuff. But if you pay maybe half the price for the ad supported version, everything is the same except there is billboards with ads for coca-cola? I don't really care at all what they do, I play a game if i enjoy it, if they can add ads into that without annoying me (forced ads to watch every time the game launch or stuff that kills immersion like an ad for coca cola in a fantasy game) go ahead.
They have been for awhile now.
Reminds me of my cable box. Over the life of this thing I'll may than pay for it outright. I'm also paying a ridiculous amount per month for service. Yet there on the bottom of the "guide" is an advertisement that takes up not one, but two slots that could otherwise be used for more guide information. Worse, THE CURSOR ACTUALLY STOPS THERE like I'm going to intentionally click on the stupid thing.
Is calling it nuka-cola instead of coke-cola is really going to ruin your game of fallout 3? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Is coca-cola really going to let the game developers allow their drink give you radiation poisoning?
I looked at doing ads in games once, and the real problem was that the advertisers weren't happy to merely see their products in the game, but rather the product placements had to be positive, and on message, and they wanted exclusivity so no competitors products... maybe the climbate has changed since then but I doubt it.
I mean, there was that huge Dodge Ram tie in with the new season of Terminator/SarahConner, and you can sort of see the same sort of placement 'control' going on. I suspect the script writers weren't allowed to write a scene where that truck gets toasted... that would be 'off message'. Dodge Ram's are safe, reliable, indestructable -- they aren't going to pay you for product placement, and then have it not start, or blow a tire, or crash...
In a game its even worse, because not everything is scripted. So while Nuka-Cola can give you radiation poisoning, Coca-Cola won't buy into that. The game becomes souless because the advertisers won't pay to associate their product with something negative.
Frankly, I'm surprised EA manages to get the exotics to sign on for some its Need for Speed outings. As much as they thrive on the dreams of street racing, they tend to avoid any official endorsement of it. Plus with NFS my understanding is that EA is paying the manufacturers, not the other way around.
Meanwhile Grand Theft Auto IV has 'Comets' instead of 'Porsches'. I'm not sure if the reason is that EA has soem sort of exclusivity, so the manufacturers can't license them, or whether the manufacturers are turning them down due to the level of criminal/violent content, or whether GTA isn't simply isn't asking because it doesn't want to pay?
I'm also curious what the situation is with military hardware/weaponry -- does a title like Rainbow six have to license the various rifles and pistols, etc? Or the rights to use an Apache / Comanche / Blackhawk...?
Well, you should be able to. There should be a "Warning: Contains Marketing" statement, alongside the warnings about violent content or bad language.
Personally I'm far more concerned about our children being exposed to marketing in video games than I am about violence or anything else that the media have moral panics about. Childhood exposure to Coca-Cola marketing and McDonalds marketing is the direct cause of many serious health problems. Childhood exposure to nipples has not been proven to have any negative effect at all (in fact, breastfeeding proponents seem to argue it's a good thing). So the ESRB and their counterparts in other countries should be putting a very prominent warning on the packaging when a game contains these nasty messages that are teaching our children to poison themselves.