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In-Game Advertising Makes Games Better?
Pretty much every time we hear about a game launching in-game advertising it sounds like a horrible idea that will only serve to detract from the experience. However JJ Richards of Massive wants you to give it a chance, claiming that if done correctly it can not only work, but actually enhance the overall experience. "In fact, according to Massive's research, gamers like ads. Here's the caveat: they have to add to the gaming experience. He describes a game that takes place in Times Square. With no ads, it's not real at all. With generic ads, it's a little better. 'Now imagine Times Square with ads you just saw on television or read in a newspaper—the latest movie release or television show or a new car model,' he said. 'Imagine further that it is up-to-the-minute, whether you played your game today or six months from now. That is much more realistic.' His argument is that gamers consume the experience of ads, not just the ads themselves. 'The ads add to and enhance that experience, and our research shows that it is highly effective for both game play as well as advertisers.'"
Sure, but you culs always do like it's done in some other games (Formula One racing Simulator, for example) where real life Marlboro, Camel. Michelin, etc ads are replaced by fake products (Colten soda, Frantic tires, etc). The result? A very realistic environment without the real life ads poisoning.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
He is right in that aspect that real-world products, trademarks or ads in real-world game can go towards players experience.
I rather see real Coca-Cola cans coming from the vending machine than some made up or close so "Joca Jola" name. It breaks the illusion.
Even if the gameworld doesn't take place in real world, but lets say future, it can still count for the user experience. It improves the scifi experience more when player can think "oh McDonalds is still around" and game designers can put more detail in to the game by coming up with some funky stuff for them.
But this also has the problem that trademark owners usually dont like showing their products in bad light and going even so far that the game is not allowed to break their cars and so on.
It's not a bad idea - but it can be really bad if done incorrectly.
How about I come park outside your house and enhance your sleeping pleasure by blaring Swedish death metal at all hours of the night? I bet with the right combination of Mayhem and Burzum you'd find that not only was the intrusion on your sleepytime making the overall sleep experience better but also that your dreams were brighter and more colorful.
STOP ADVERTISING TO ME WHEN I'VE ALREADY PAID FOR YOUR PRODUCT, ASSHOLE.
While never released, I worked on a video game that was set in the future, and we planned to have fake ads on billboards to make the game more realistic. If we put ads for future products that might exist, i.e. the Sony PS9, it would have been even better.
However, a popup that distracts from the game would have been right out.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
My problem with advertising in games isn't that I am fundamentally opposed to it - in fact, if it can make producing games more lucrative or cheaper for me, I'm all for it. The problem is when you get two or three companies sponsoring an entire in-game world, and every other billboard is displaying the exact same advertisement. That breaks my immersion much faster than a made up product. But, it costs time and money to negotiate these deals, so it is much easier to get two big advertisers than the twenty or thirty that would make for added realism. If advertisers and game producers didn't have to deal with negotiating a new deal each time, I imagine the diversity of in-game ads would go way up. Perhaps there is a business opportunity to be found here.
You have to remember that the ads are integrated in the gameworld. Or atleast should be, not like how Wipeout HD did it.
He has a good point in that if you have a supposedly realistic world and lets say Manhattan or Tokyo, it's not really real without any ads. Surprisingly, fake product names break the illusion too (unless you can do them with humor like in GTA IV - but thats not always the case in more serious games). Real ads can add up to the player experience, if integrated correctly in to the game world.
No, we really, really, don't. I hate ads with a passion, and I can't imagine a situation where I would rather have any space in-game taken up by an ad display than a blank space or a simple generic texture.
This goes double for ads that require an internet connection to update and waste my bandwidth for something I have no interest in.
And lastly, I can not imagine finding anything relevant in an in-game ad: Wow, the new Ferrari is out! I must buy one immediately! Hey, the cinemas in Left4Dead 2: The Bloodening advertise the newest RomCom, surely a must-see!
I play games to fucking escape my ordinary life, not to have the worst aspects transplanted into it, especially since most games don't have realistic (as in "real-world") characters in them, anyway ("90% of all genetically enhanced super-soldiers agree: Clearasil is the choice of space marines!").
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
I can see some utility in this. Imagine if you are toting around your grenade launcher and you see an ad that particularly annoys you. So long as you can frag it, I am all for having it in the game.
Especially effective if you have political advertisements so that you can launch your grenades at a poster with the face of your favorite political demon.
How can a fictional ad jar you from immersion in a fictional setting more then a real ad, trying to get you to buy a real product in a fictional setting?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I understand that advertisers pay big bucks. However, I'm absolutely sick and overwhelmed by the amount of advertisement I encounter everyday. It's information overload at a conscious and subconscious level for most. Considering the relevance of the information to one's life, it's nothing but spam. It makes it harder for kids and adults alike to focus and pay attention to worthwhile information. Does advertisement make the gaming experience better? It has no relevance, no matter how well you hide it. Advertisers' ultimate goal is to implant a self-serving everlasting memory into your brain. I understand the size of the economics behind this sector, but it's too inflated in every aspect.
Come on, everybody knows what kind of ads gamers really want.
Anyone in advertising that I've ever spoken with always insists people love advertising. However, I've never spoken to anyone outside of advertising that says they like ads. I would think the emergence of things like DVRs, browser adblockers, etc would be a big clue to the advertising industry.
> 'Imagine further that it is up-to-the-minute, whether you played your game today or six months from now
Yes! *That* is what's been missing from my gaming experiences recently. I knew someone would figure it out. All those classic games I enjoyed in the decades past... little did I know how much better they'd have been if they only had up to the minute advertising! They didn't have advertising *at all*, so now I realize that I wasn't actually enjoying Baldur's Gate or Elite 2. It was a hollow experience, compared to today's FPSs. Who cares how dumbed down the gameplay gets; what we *really* want is up to the minute advertising. Give us that, and we'll be happy little consumers and buy ever more of your shiny products.
Thank you, Mr Advertising Man, for making it all so clear now. I hadn't even realized!
The only games I can think of that try to be as close to RL as they can get are the Sims & GTA. OK, for these games the times square example has some validity, but even there, we are not really there for the ads, but to play the damned game. As soon as they start modifying the gameplay to make the ads more visible than they are in RL they will have gone too far.
I don't want a driving game where the ads are so in your face that you cannot see the track. I don't want a soccer game where the ads are 5 times the size they are in RL. I do not want to be pestered by ads for softdrinks in WoW. Unfortunately I'm sure that once advertising gets a foothold in gaming these & other abuses will outweigh any increase in "realism".
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
A real world, with real chains and real ads, all of which are made up is the best way to do it. You have all the liberties of not infringing anyones shit, and a nice in-world level of coherency and realism. Using real-world advertisements would be detrimental.
In racing or sports games on the other hand, you're simulating the real world - so of course you want real world ads to go with, and can probably swipe some money from the guys.
It all depends on what you want to achieve. For gritty real-world shit, you want to get actual advertisements - for ironic, fun and fantasy "world"-games (of which I notice a bit of a lack of well thought out ones), you go with alternatives. Non-world games (which are getting rarer...) should of course not feature any ads at all, thankyouverymuch.
I could go for some limited product placement. . .
Like, say, in a car game like a GTA, having actual brands of cars, and having their physics more or less be accurate for the car model (so that the BMWs and Ferraris accelerate much more quickly than, say, the Smart Car, and being able to 'Test Drive' the car in-game by jacking it from a car lot. (Note, I've not yet played any of the Recent GTAs, so they may have even done this, by now, for all I know - the last GTA I played was Vice City, though I'm slowly catching up with the rest of the world).
There might be other things. . . like maybe having some virtual mannequins in store windows dressed up in styles some department store or designer is trying to promote in real life, or maybe having some of the npc 'citizens' which are walking around the streets wearing such fashions. It would get very annoying, though, if those same npc citizen's are spamming the local chat with exclamations like, "I *love* these new $designerName slacks I got at $vendorName". Maybe if I was actually interested in what he/she was wearing, I could go talk to them individually and find out more info in a private 'conversation'. I think I could tolerate that.
The virtual billboards/signs thing, though, I'm less inclined to want. I've always found it much more entertaining to have funny *parodies* of real ads in a game, than actual ads. For example, in the game City of Heroes/City of Villains, they had some very funny and clever fake ads, like a defense lawyer who had a billboard about getting villains back on the streets of Paragon City.
CoH even had some quests/storylines which were based around some of the fake products you would see advertised in the city (like a Cola which was, I dunno, poisoning the population, or mutating them, or something, by the local MegaCorp). How can you have things like that if you are using real advertisers? I doubt Coke Zero will appreciate it very much if you have a plot based around their beverage doing bad things to kids (although, maybe Coke would pay to have Pepsi be the culprit *grin*).
"In fact, according to Massive's research, gamers like ads."
Emphatically, absolutely, unequivocally
WRONG.
something that people hate, like ads, will somehow become likeable if it conforms to a time-based nature? so fallout 3 would have "double pits to chesty" axe ads and that would make them likeable? or perhaps Wolfenstein will have ads for family guy and armor all?
plus i dont think the technology in some cases has been well thought out. example: the same flash gamestop ad, between every clip of The Venture Brothers on Adult Swim, means i see the same rabbit sell me the same shit 5 times for one show. thats a commercial EVERY 6 MINUTES until i have memorized every line in it after 8 videos (40 viewings of the same damned commercial) and hanged myself in the bathroom.
anyone thought out how angry im going to be when i pay $65 for the latest xbox game only to enjoy commercials and advertisement in it at every opportunity? A comcept that works: Streets of Sim City made commercials laughable for fake products, which actually made the game more fun because a trailer full of marketing execs and legal teams weren't scared about market penetration or viewer reaction.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Make players wait in line to buy items in an MMORPG. Make those leveling up characters only capable of talking to one person at a time, and they get breaks, too. Require bathroom breaks or experience loss of social status as characters crap their pants. Require quarterly paperwork to file video game taxes.
This guy is an idiot.
Yes, advertising in-game if it's done right can add "flavour" to a scene, like mentioned in the article.
However, far too often advertising in-game tends to be placed in ways that are an eyesore. I know there's a couple of games that actually use their multiplayer scoreboard as adspace, which is a significant eyesore. High visibility isn't always a good thing when it comes to in-game ads.
I don't know. I think ads in games aren't going to disappear anytime soon, but I can say with certainty that a game that uses in-game advertising won't live long if those ads are overly distracting or take away from the gameplay.
Or maybe it's reality that's broken. Imagine a Times Square that doesn't have all the ads, but instead has art, or beautiful architecture. Wouldn't that be -much- better?
Starting from the assumption that ads are good can only lead to the conclusion that ads are good.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Maybe Times Square would be improved by removing the inundation of advertising. Been there, seen it, pretty lame actually once you look just a bit past the initial "Ooh! Shiny!" reflex.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
How SAD it is that our culture has gotten to the point where we need ads and overt commercialism to validate an experience as 'real.'
This is the same problem that plagues the movie industry now, where entire plotlines revolve around using famous TV anchors, Larry King et al, or pretend news reels, and copious doses of ads and famous logos to make something unbelievable seem more real.
Oh gee, if they're interviewing that space alien on Oprah and he's feeling depressed and she's helping give him a sense of self worth then it MUST be real and we laugh along knowingly because it fits in with our mental schema of the real world. WTF.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
Thank you. I was starting to wonder whether I was the only gamer out there who was surprised that I was "consuming the experience of ads".
No. I do not consume the experience of ads. Here's what I do:
I play multiplayer games with friends, where the goal is generally to beat something or each other. I don't give a rat's ass about ads at that point. The fact that the walls around a soccer field say adidas instead of amiras doesn't matter one lick to me. Just to show how little names matter: I don't care whether I have Ronaldinho on my team, or Rohualdo.
I play single player games, where I want to be told a story, or have my brain and hand-eye coordination challenged. Ads can add to the story in the situation of a story. But really, if Psychonauts would have had an ad for a $5 footlong from Subway, I would have put the game away immediately. The one product placement that I was able to tolerate very well were the Dole bananas in Monkeyball: the logo was tiny, I rarely saw it anyway, and it kinda made sense.
But here is what I do expect from actual ads in a game: a cheaper game. I'm willing to put up with ads and product placement on two conditions: they fit into the world the game describes, and they result in a game that would not have been possible without them. If Shenmue would have had actual ads from the 80s, with payment going towards production costs, I would have been ok with that.
However - and this is why I consider marketing executives evil - the idea that I consume the experience of ads requires a mindset that I can't even begin to imagine. Ads are a necessary evil. They are not something I want to experience.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
You could use real ads, but fixed in time. When is the game set? 1995? Then the ads should be from 1995, not updated to today. That's not realistic. Is the game set in 2009 (today as of this writing)? Then it should have those ads, you know, in Times Square. But probably not in some evil villian's fortress, or wherever the game actually takes place.
Some games, novels, and movies are supposed to be set "today" or "a year from now", though obviously these things all look very dated after twenty years. In these cases only could he defend his case.
Since all he's *really* doing is trying to justify a massive cash flow- after all, most games aren't set in times square, or any other heavily-dominated-by-advertising area- it doesn't even matter what he's saying. But even if we take him at face value, he's hip deep in BS.
I won't buy games with ads. I avoid TV because I hate ads. Keep them the hell out games, thanks.
TMNT for the NES has Pizza Hut ads everywhere. Looks absurd. Looked absurd back then too.
In their own minds, they are helping deliver valuable products that people enjoy, and informing them about their choices. Cognitive dissonance keeps them from thinking about what they are really doing. It keeps them from putting two and and two together. They went to school to learn mind control. In their own discussions they can be very frank about the fact that they want to control people and get them to do things that may be against their best interest, but they can not see that in moral terms they are doing something very, very wrong. They are planting false ideas in people's heads, making them believe that a company loves them, that a beer will make them sexy, that a pill will make their dicks bigger or their bellies smaller, that choosing the right products will make them popular and happy. They are preying on people's insecurities. And it works. If marketing were not capable of controlling people's actions, it would be useless.
You know, there is another class of goods that gets accused of controlling people's actions and making them do harmful things against their will: drugs. We can't even prove that drugs do this, while advertising would not be salable if it didn't. Why are drugs illegal but advertising is legal?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Maybe. But generic ads can be humorous, too. Real ads have to take themselves seriously.
FAIL. Using the CUSTOMER'S bandwidth pulling down up-to-the-minute ads, so you can get paid for advertising in a game the CUSTOMER already bought? Advertising that will always change, thereby distracting from the game itself? And pitching that as an improvement? FAIL, sir.
Besides which, realism is only good when it makes a game more fun. Realistic explosions? Good. Realistic insurance claims afterwards? Bad. Some aspects of reality suck, and people play games to escape them.
Well, an in-game ad is also kind of an insane way to deal with people who play your game.
Instead of saying "This game is great", an in-game ad says "Go do something else that is more fun".
It is similar to a porn site that tries to make money off links to competing porn sites.
I can see that ads have their place in free games which would otherwise not be possible, and that it could make sense if your game melds in with real life non-gaming ads.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Proper ads are bad because they create fake desire in your mind. It doesn't matter how smart you are, they get under your skin. The only safe thing to do, is to not see them. The funny one in GTA are a different thing, they make you smile as opposed to real one, who makes you depressed because you can't afford them.
P.S: Sure we all love ads, this is why we remove all the stupid intros from the games, which only reason to exist are to delay the start of the game.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Not a bad idea at all if you give me the game for free. Kinda like every other thing I have with advertisements. I refuse to buy something and have to pay for it after I've paid for it. I don't buy shirts with advertisements on them. I don't buy TV shows with advertisements on them (that's right, no cable and somehow by some great miracle I'm still alive). And, I won't buy games with advertisements on them. (Now, if only movies didn't have ads, I might purchase those rather than waiting a couple months and going to the library.) But, if it makes the game free (as it sometimes does my clothes and TV shows) then I might get the game (if I'm interested enough).
It has a "replica" of what looks like a famous NY street pattern and looks just like it (well like the hollywood versions I have seen anyway) and not a real ad in the entire game.
Sorry, but the story ain't about realistic billboards in the game, advertising don't work that way. The Coca Cola company doesn't want that crushed rusty can that just rolled away to bear its logo, it wants you to sit watching their latest ad for 30 seconds while you want to play the game.
They don't want you to be a F1 driver, watching a yellow line that is your cars hood and maybe see the shell logo clearly in a flash in a replay. They want you to see their commercial, for 30 seconds and possibly more.
So yes, real world games CAN gain some immersion by having real world ads in it. But that is NOT what advertisers want, the opposite in fact. GTA did NOT have permission to use REAL car names for their cars. Why not? Free advertising right? Nope.
Not only does Coca Cola NOT want to pay for that crushed rusty can that ads to immersion, they do NOT want THEIR logo splattered with the brains of the hooker you just killed for a bit of cash.
Oh, and remember one thing please gamers, IF you sanatize your product and make it overrun with ads, you will have the same effect as TV. No, not free money. The gamer audience, that most lucrative market of young adult men leaving for something else. It already happened to TV. Why do you think we game? because there is nothing on tv.
The article mentions that the ads are "only" 4-5 minutes in an hour, hardly anything compared to tv. So what are all the complaints about? Because it won't stop there. Advertisers basically want to chain their customer to their ads, forbid them to leave at pain of pain. They WILL increase the amount watched, make it harder and harder to skip until people finally rebel.
Look at what happened to tv. Innocent commercial blocks have now become so invasive the ads are broadcast OVER the actual program.
If advertisers had their way you would be driving a cola can powered by cola, collecting cola buttons to spend on cola bottles and every single texture is the cola logo. Interrupt every 30 seconds by a 2 minute commercial.
Right now an advertiser is creaming his pants at this wonderful idea. You know it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I work in advertising.
People hate advertising. They're inundated with it. People in advertising hate advertising (at least on the creative side)... but they recognize that it's a necessary evil, and it's one of the most reliable ways for slacker artist types like myself to get gainful career employment. I have no illusions. I'm helping sell shit to people that they don't want or need.
Usually, I work in business to business stuff, so I don't have to do the soul-searching thing as often as folks who market for consumer brands/retail.
Occasionally people might enjoy a Superbowl spot, or the like, but those are generally narratives, and they account for the tiniest fraction of a percent of all advertising.
I appreciate the craft and thought process that goes into making effective marketing in the same way that I can appreciate move recaps of classic chess games. That doesn't mean I want to experience them in real-time. I want to experience them on my own terms... marketers' responses have been to simply scream louder and louder so that the advertising can't be avoided.
My $12 movie ticket buys me 20 minutes of advertorial (not including previews) if I want to get a decent seat. I get congratulated on my free nano or wii 200x a day if I forget to disable Flash. Same thing on a different scale.
TLDR: Don't think you know too many folks who create advertising... just ones who sell it. There's a difference.