Certainly the initial post and all follow-ups in kind are meticulously crafted for the Qt3 environment. Long, verbose, crashingly boring, “paradigm” in the title, insinuation that “we” are all part of The Industry. The payload, of course, is the dissenting position on a well-worn issue with a clear majority opinion – the iron fist of “XBOX SUCKS LOL” in the velvet glove of an attempt to blend in with the regulars.
But it’s really undermined by that “haha wow stusser” post. I know, the thrill of milking out a quotable quote can be exhilarating, but how can the audience be expected to reconcile that uninhibited guffaw of joy with the previous carefully established beige-gamer image?
Also, the results are terse, sparse, and negative. Ideally, the post would trick people not just into participating but into genuinely engaging.
Apprentice-level work – shows signs of understanding the subtleties of the trade, but not of being able to implement them effectively.
I’m not really sure what Unicorn McGriddle is talking about, but I’ve been thinking a bit more about stusser’s challenge:
how [can] advertising actually lead to better games.
That’s a fair question. It’s not exactly in line with what I’ve been thinking about the past couple of days, but it’s a fair question.
Let me take the TV example further, and try to both answer stusser’s question as well as incorporate the ideas I expressed in the initial post. TV shows fly or fail based on audience numbers. Clearly, in-game advertising rates should depend on sales and (in the case of, say, MMORPGs and their ilk) the amount of time players spend each week playing them.
If Microsoft releases a hit (and largely online) game like Halo 3, the advertising rates for billboards in the game should be suitably expensive. When Activision goes to purchase billboard time in Halo 3 to push Quake Wars, they have to make a value judgement: is the expense of advertising Quake Wars in Halo 3 justified? This may lead them to want to make sure Quake Wars itself is of high enough quality to justify the marketing expense. Further, as Quake Wars is similarly an online title, Actvision will want to insure people keep playing it, and here’s the key, even though they don’t collect monthly subscription fees, because doing so insures the rates for billboards in Quake Wars stays high.
You don’t watch any Disney, do you? They have several trailers embedded
into the startup stream, unskippable, unbearable, UNPLEASANT!
I don’t think sitting down with the latest Pixar is very pleasant when I have
to also sit through trailers for Cinderella XVI:The Ashening before I even see
the frickin’ menu. (Annoyance not available in all areas.)
Wait–what is Tom’s present form? And how can we hope to defeat him if he keeps mutating?!
Whatever form in-game advertising takes, I’d prefer to not have it at all. Games are a high-priced product, not a nominally-priced product in which the ads are intended to offset the cost for the consumer. Show me the game publisher who is offering to drop the price of their games in half (minimum–75% or more would be better) in exhange for filling the game with advertising, and I’ll maybe reconsider. Probably not, though, because in general, I’d prefer to pay a premium to not be assaulted with ads.
It’s a moot point, though, because publishers aren’t going to do that. They just want to boost profits, and figure that ads won’t piss people off too much. I think they are wrong. People get pissed off about having to watch ads when they pay $10 to see a movie; you think they are going to roll over when they’ve paid $50 to play a game? How do you think consumers would respond if HBO announced that they will now be adding advertising to their programs (same monthly fee, though!)? I think you’d see a lot of people canceling their HBO subscription.
I think games might be able to get away with some subtle product placement, at most. People might even get pissed at that, depending on the context (modern-day ads in Battlefield 2042, for instance). It can work pretty transparently in some games, though. All things considered, though, I’d prefer that this Pandora’s box not be opened at all.
I make games, and I advertise. I don’t combine the two. i won’t pay more than 10 cents a click, and assuming a 1% click through, that’s 1000 ad views per dollar. Given that you don’t expect an ad to work after maybe the 10th time its shown (becomes old news), that means I need to show you 100 different product ads to get my one dollars worth. assuming a 10% subsidy to the game dev for having advertising means a $60 game earning $6 from ads, or roughly 600 different ads, and 6,000 views. If you play the game on average for 10 one-hour sessions, that’s 600 ads a minute, or 10 a second. hello blipverts.
That also means I need to find 600 different advertising messages to show you, ten times each, as you play through the game, in order to get a 10% price reduction.
Unless your game is ‘billboard tycoon’, you will not get away with this.
The fact that nobody is doing this, means that estimates of the profitabiltiy of in-game ads must be laughably off. Anyone paying good money for in game ads is insane.
Ads in games gets marketing people all sweaty and erect, but the simple economics do not add up. It’s dead right from the start.
Just make good games and get people to buy them, its what people want.
Some of these points have been made already, but I’ll sum my thoughts, and I think they represent the majority of gamers.
Point 1: In game ads annoy the ever loving hell out of me, and will cause me to not buy a game, UNLESS they are somehow in context and not intrusive, like the bus stop advertisements (that could, incidentally, be shot and destroyed), in Rainbow Six: Vegas. Vegas is full of ads, so it’s not bothersome. If I was playing a game set in Times Square and there were no ads, it’d feel a little weird. I don’t mind if they are real or fake, really, but it does bug me a little bit. A poster of an upcoming movie on the wall of a terrorist stronghold is annoying and intrusive. ANY ad in a fantasy game is intrusive. Anything anachronistic is intrusive.
I would not mind ads in game as much if they game cost less because of it. Also, you would have to advertise this fact. Hell, if you put the Mountain Dew logo in front of Halo 3 on startup and then had Master Chief bust through it (and it took 5 seconds), I’d pay $50 rather than $60 for it. But if it’s the same price I’d throw it out the fucking window.
Fuck advertising in any form. I know, I’m part of the problem, but I’ve had to put up with advertising intruding in nearly every other aspect of life and I’m not willing to put up with it in my last vestige of escapism.
I think you could get away with product placement and not too many people would complain as long as it fits the game setting. Like the pcs in cs_office are dells. I don’t think anyone cares about that.
On the other hand, I found the Dell XPS console system in FEAR surprisingly jarring. Every time I encountered it, I would mentally note that I hate in game ads, and also never to buy that computer. Maybe it’s more a product of me overthinking the issue than their mistake, but it usually jars me out of the reality of the game if I can pick it out.
Which is why I let the disks autoplay for about 10 mins before I turn on the TV.
But, I do want to call out that this is the Old Disney way. They were flooded by parental complaints about this and now they have what they call “Disney Fast Play” in which you can hit Menu and get to the Menu… others call it The Way It Should Have Been In The First Place.
Also, the head of Pixar is now the head of Disney animation and he has vowed no more stupid direct-to-DVD crap sequals.
If you guys don’t think there’s “in-show” advertising in TV you’re unaware of just how badly you’re being suckered.
“Goodbye little Versa” says Hiro, as the car he’s drive for half the season leaves the cast…
I watched an old episode of “Gilmore Girls” the other day that name-checked another TV show from the same network, Warner Brothers Music artists, listed off something like six Warner Brothers musicals (probably released in a box set that month), and Wal-Mart all in the same episode. They’ll also often stuff a rack of frito-lay chips into the background, or have a name brand soda on the table.
Studios are also using that sports image insertion technology to re-sell advertising space in the background of sit-coms like Friends, by replacing images in the backgrounds to sell in-show ads.
That lets you advertise even if the show is being downloaded off the torrents.
Is it pervasive? Well, sci-fi shows, for example, is one of the reasons that they’re more expensive is that they can’t defray costs by easily inserting product into the environments.
I’m sure that same thinking will come to games. “Why don’t you set it in the near future? That should let us sell some more ads on the billboards.”
I’d argue that Red Bull would have never taken off in the US if they hadn’t plastered ads for it all over Wipeout XL.
Hell, even the far future works. Intel CoreDuo2, almost 200 years of computing or whatever in BF2142 gets me to chortle, for example. The McDonalds scene in The Fifth Element… not so much. Still, there they are, quite comfortably.
Advertising on the internet is not the same as other mediums, and your experience does not transfer directly like you think it does.
Spider-man 3 had a ton of product placement, but lets just look at one example. Maker’s Mark whiskey. Both Osborns drink it exclusively in all three spidey movies. Spider-man 3 had an audience of roughly 35 million in its theatrical release in the US. Lets call that 35 million unique impressions, assuming that nobody saw it twice. At 1% click-through (which of course doesn’t apply to movies or games, but I’ll go with it), we’re hitting 350,000 “clicks”. At ten cents apeice, US$35,000. Do you really think Sony charged them only $35k to show their main supporting character guzzling Maker’s Mark bourbon with the label clearly visible? The film had a two hundred sixty million dollar budget.
