Slashdot Mirror
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.
My dilznick!
I don't find ads too bad on TV but perhaps it's because I live in the UK.
We only have ads between shows on BBC stations due to it being publicly funded. On our other channels, ads are usually limited to one ad break half way through a 30min show or once every 30mins or so in films.
Certainly when I've been to the US and Canada I can see how ads on some channels are enough to drive people away from TV altogether- I recall one show having ads every 5mins and I simply gave up trying to follow the show, it was too broken up to follow.
I wouldn't mind ads in games on in-game billboards and such if it weren't for one thing- nowadays, I have to pay for my bandwidth. The days of unlimited bandwidth are gone, I'm capped and get charged over that cap. I object to having these ads be streamed from a server costing me my bandwidth.
I'd care less if Microsoft insisted that if an ISP wants to be XBox live compatible certified it also has to not count XBox live bandwidth towards our caps but that's not the case- even ISPs who give you 5gb a month, something you'll use on 3 or so demos are listed as Xbox live certified, that doesn't seem right to me.
If they want to keep feeding me ads, they need to pass some of the ad revenue to me, either directly or by taking the costs of the original game price because it's costing me my bandwidth. I paid for the game, I pay for XBox live- both those I accepted to pay and am happy to pay for, I shouldn't have to suffer further hidden costs no matter how small to help increase their profits.
This stems back to a greater thing that irks me certainly, that nowadays my computing resources are no longer treated as mine. The same issue arises with DRM- why should I have to use my disk space to store their protection crap.
The use of our resources for their profits is negligible right now, but there was a time when people wouldn't even stand for any use. I imagine it's only going to get worse, and the fact ads are creeping in as part of that is only evidence that it's already happening. Right now it's still ads, or very short animated GIFs perhaps, how long before we're expected to stream high bandwidth movie trailers to an in-game cinema screen or TV?
If it does get much worse then I too will join you and simply stop buying, I spend over £2000 a year on console hardware and on games. PC hardware was on top of that but I don't spend so much there now due to the half-assed ports to the PC from console and abysmal DRM.