In-game advertisements
So I was reading an article earlier today about how in-game advertising is apparently ineffective, and it made me recall a discussion I had with someone not too long ago regarding my feelings towards in-game ads. It seems like a pretty good topic for a post so I figured what the heck, I’ll go ahead and throw my thoughts out there. Let me start off by saying that, in most cases, I’m cool with seeing an advertisement when I’m playing a game. The reason for that is most developers have become wise enough that they blend the ads into the game world to make it look more authentic.
For example, I was playing Project Gotham Racing 4 when this conversation went down, and I think I said something to the effect that I don’t mind them in a racing game because if you’re driving around a city in real life you expect to see ads, that’s just how the world works. So really, the ads can be viewed as enhancing the authenticity in a game like PGR where there’s some value to knowing you’re driving around an authentic city. At the same time I can sort of understand why this would lead to the in-game advertisements failing (like the article says) because I don’t know about you but I tend to block out advertising in my surroundings. Sure, I might notice a new billboard once but after that I kind of forget about it. I think the issue might be that the ads are so well placed that they just blend in with the rest of the game environment and no one pays them much attention.
The alternative to that is advertisements that completely take you out of the game. I recently started up a trial subscription to one of my favorite MMO’s from back in the day – The Matrix Online. One of my friends has been trying to coax me back into the game (a few years ago when it first came out I played it to death) and so he hooked me up with the 2-week trial. I was running down a street completing a mission (as one does in these games) when from out of nowhere I hear Will Ferrell’s voice yelling at me to get some Old Spice deodorant because, and I quote, "sweating is when hundreds of sweat glands drop a deuce." It startled me at first, so much so that I thought I might have left Firefox open in the background and got hit by a pop-up, so I alt+tabbed out of the game but Firefox was closed. Finally I found the culprit – the developers of The Matrix Online have rented in-game billboards to advertisers. So what I saw was a billboard playing an extremely low-quality video of Will Ferrell as Jackie Moon from his latest movie Semi-Pro. Unfortunately, to finish that part of the game I had to complete some objectives in a nearby building, and the whole time this message from Jackie Moon was looping over and over again. Now I like Will Ferrell, but that was pretty freaking annoying.
The article mentions that the smartest model for game advertising seems to be the "play for free" one. Basically, a gamer can choose to either purchase a game or let ads pay for their time, and as the game is loading they’ll see a 30-second or so advertisement for Coke but they get to play for free. This is a pretty common theme on the internet, especially with video sites like YouTube. Sure, a lot of people complained at first when YouTube said they were going to start placing ads in some videos, but their ads don’t take up a whole lot of space and it keeps YouTube free so what can people complain about really? I think that’s the key to advertising. As long as the ads aren’t too obtrusive and they also save me from having to pay extra for something, I’m happy.
What about games though? The cost of games hasn’t gone down anytime lately, and now they’re working in ads too? How can that be fair? Well, a lot has changed since advertising in games became popular. First off, it costs more now than ever to produce a game. So much so that most games approach the cost of major motion pictures just for development, and the costs keep rising as the industry gains more popularity and the pressure to put out a good product increases. Second, look at what has happened with services like Xbox Live and the Playstation Network. These services have brought a phenomenon to console games that has been available for PC games for a while – downloadable content. Downloadable content is generally developed in most part after the game is released, so you could say the advertising would help pay for the extra content that gives your games a few extra hours of playtime. Sure, not all DLC is free, but there’s still a lot out there that is.
So really I just wanted to make a post (it almost seems like I have done this post before since I’ve mentioned it in passing previously) about how in-game advertising, for the most part, isn’t an evil scheme by game developers to rake in more cash. I’m cool with it, like I said, as long as it isn’t yelling at me from a billboard across the street. =P
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