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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 types of in-game advertising players will and won't be seeing in the near future
Hey, game publishers, let me tell you what types of in-game advertising I'll be seeing in the near future: NONE! Know how I know? because I WON'T BE BUYING YOUR PRODUCTS! Seriously. It's the reason I quit watching television several years ago: it was bad enough that the quality of the shows was weak, but the encroachment of pervasive, obvious product placement and obnoxious on-screen banners thoroughly ruined the experience.
I play games to escape from this garbage, not to endorse it. I'm not interested in your advertising, and as of late I'm barely interested in your cookie-cutter games that are big on cost & hardware requirements and poor for overall entertainment value. You're walking a fine line, already.
What I'm saying is, you need to focus on the basics -- creating games that are fun and deliver good value -- rather than considering my eyeballs some sort of resource that you get to exploit.
Pissing off your customer base is not the road to financial success. But what do I know? I'm only the person who used to buy your products. And I suspect there are many, many more people who share my sentiments.
No, it's not fair. I'm paying for the game. My time is valuable, and it is not for sale to advertisers. When they give me the games for free, they can put in ads. Until then, I don't want advertisements of any kind, and I will not buy any games from any company which sells them.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
I want to tell you to get off the soap box, but you're partially right. The in-game ads in Guitar Hero III were completely immersion-breaking for me. It's a small part of why I've stopped supporting that series.
Advertisements don't always break immersion though--series like Madden and Tony Hawk would be really cheesy if they lacked ads for real products/companies like what you would see in a real football/skateboarding arena. I don't have a problem with publishers capitalizing on this, and it would be insane to expect them not to.
Also, the banner ads in the Battle.net lobbies never bothered me very much--I'd get into a game and forgot about them.
Like I said to another poster- name one time that a company has ever lowered prices because they started accepting ads. They either go free and sell ads, or they keep the price exactly where it is. If they already know you will pay x for a game, they have no reason to charge less than x. They'll keep charging the same amount and make that plus the ad money.
And no, I still wouldn't buy it. I wouldn't boycott the company if they were upfront about it, but I would never buy anything with ads in it. I'd rather support products that don't do that bullshit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Go ahead, make pirated versions even Better Than Original. If you can flip a JNE to JE and bypass protection, it should be no problem to just jump over the "render ads to screen" or "download ads from server and save to file" function.
True, modern DRM is a bit more difficult than flipping JNE to JE, but that just goes in the favor of the pirates; the ad-download function can't be more difficult than the DRM, and they're already quite able to remove the DRM... So, yeah, publishers, go ahead and compete yourself out of the market.
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.
The reason the GTA series was unable to obtain a license to model the games cars and name them after real world cars was because none of the car manufacturers wanted to see their car associated with not just violence....but they refused to allow an in game model of their be susceptible to any sort of damage. This has been documented in the past before not mostly with the GTA franchise, but with every racing franchise in history.
It's the reason why in the Gran Turismo (racing series on SONY platforms) they have a complete licenses to use exact replicas of hundreds of real life cars from dozens of competing auto companies. It's because the GT producers and developers SIGNED a contract stating that no cars could be damaged in the game by the player. That's why in GT you can ram cars into walls, drive 130 MPH head on into another car, and nothing happens to the car or the player. This is all intentional in order to obtain the license to use the car brand names.
This goes even further with sports games. Nothing controversial can ever be allowed in sports game that use the official Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA, etc. license. No players can get kicked off the team for shooting themselves in the leg (Plaxico) or hosting an illegal dog fighting ring (Vick) or beating their wives (B. Myers) or using steroids (half of MLB).
Metal Gear Solid 4 had an item called 'Playboy' that you could use to distract enemy soldiers with who would read the magazine instead of fighting you. In game advertisement? Sure. Distracting? Not really. Because it's a natural element to the game, magazines have been in MGS before.
Would seeing COCA COLA and PEPSI banners inside the sports stadiums of sporting games really put people off this badly that they would stop playing games? I wouldn't think so. Most people who play sports games watch sports, and sports have the most advertisements per minute of show than any other television genre.
But...would I want to see giant banners for PEPSI or DORITOS in GTA4, or Fallout 3? No. Because they would seem so out of place and would detract very much from the game.
But those advertisements could be REMOVED on the PC versions. Don't like that PEPSI ad? Replace it with a picture of your girlfriend by substituting some texture or .img files in the director the game is in. Or create an advertisement free mod of the game. I'm sure it would be the most popular mod. Consoles gamers (I am one, and a PC gamer) will get stuck with commercials but PC gamers hopefully can just MOD advertisements right out of most games.