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Ads Retroactively Added To Wipeout HD, Soon Others
An anonymous reader writes "American users of Wipeout HD might have noticed that there's an advertisement showing up all of a sudden during loading, both during online and offline play. This, according to a poster on the well-known gaming forum NeoGAF, is being done covertly. The writer suspects that the display software was installed during update 2.01, and the ad-content is now being snuck in. Gamasutra has a story on the company responsible for the software to deliver these ads, Double Fusion, which said it plans to launch in-game advertising in 'another handful' of PS3 games by the end of the year. So, what's next? Can we look forward to fighting the Kool-Aid Man and zombified Mars bars in Uncharted, or is there anything that can be done to hinder companies from adding advertisements retroactively, without the customer's prior knowledge?"
Some ads and product placement make sense in the context of a game. In sports stadiums or racing tracks, they may even ad realism. You just have to do it right.
But a video during a loading screen -- and worse, making it ten seconds longer? That's NOT acceptable.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Read the summary?
How do you boycott something when the advertisements show up several months after you've bought it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Here in the internet backwater country we call Australia we get a limited amount of bandwidth usage quota.
Every time the PS3/game downloads advertisements it uses my limited quota...
If I run out of quota I either have to buy more, or suffer 64kbit shaping...
And I consider myself lucky, some ISP's charge 18 cents per meg when you go over your quota without the ability to buy more.
I don't mind ads in web pages, or even sensible advertising in online gaming because they constantly require money to upkeep - but a game I've PAID FOR download and am playing OFFLINE doesn't cost the provider a damn cent!
Bullshit. I bought the game for $20 without ads. What the hell gives them the right to change the game content of something I've already bought and paid for (a year ago!) Next they'll be changing the music or lyrics of song I bought.
Yep. I'd estimate in my experience for every 20 or so people who say "Screw them, I'm not buying that", 1 will actually follow through.
I've boycotted a hell of a lot of games over the years due to copy protection, greed of the developer etc... I realise my boycott makes no difference to the company. But it does make a difference to me.
Sony will make more money from the advertising than they'll lose from disgruntled customers sadly, until such time as the consumer at large grows a set and stands up to say "Enough".
so long as it is not offensive, what's the issue?
The point is that a change to the game's content could make them have to go through the ESRB review/rating process all over again, causing delays and maybe additional expenses for them. It'd be a way of making it a bit more of a hassle for them to assume that the game you bought with no such advertisements has now become a billboard.
I think ESRB makes an exception for "online play" (I'd speculate this is because of the difficulty/undesirability of censoring the other players) but it seems there were changes to offline play as well.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Any players notice traffic to ad servers? Post the hostnames and people can just map them to 127.0.0.1.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I rather think if this were a game I had already paid for, sans ads, that suddenly started showing them I would find the change quite offensive.
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