If the ads are like for SWAT4, which seemed to help the team continue to support the game long after release, I am all for it. And in fact, most billboard ads are fine with me.
What I cannot stand and cannot believe one reviewer didn’t mention were the ads in NCAA 2007. They were so obtrusive, they actually blocked your ability to get feedback on pre-snap controls. Hell, you couldn’t even see your own backfield when they ran them. And they would run them at great times, like with 10 seconds left and you are getting ready to kick the game winning field goal.
That is nuts that they would affect gameplay chet…
There was also the wodnerful splinter cell north kroean military base with the duece bigalow ads… ugh…
If they were all swat 4 style and only in the games? fine.
extra content like the wipeout coca cola tracks? GREAT IDEA, optional AND gives you something.
there are non-shit ways to do it, but I dont expect ad folks to come up with them.
fight night r3 was actually going to be my 1st 360 game, but I still havent bought it and likely never will. The demo has NO ads and lest me have a 2 player fight whenever I want, so I’ve settled for that so I dont have to hear about chicken fries and dodge shitmobiles.
Ads to support development are one thing. Ad to make more money? That’s altogether another. MMOs with ads instead of monthly fees? Great. Online FPS games that are free that have ads? Great!
But I’m going to vote with my dollar when it comes to games that have obtrusive or immersion breaking advertisements.
Yeah, that’s the crux right there. Every other medium that includes advertising does so as a means of subsidizing the cost, in order to lower the cost to the end consumer.
In case you guys missed it in the other thread. Here’s one of MASSIVE ENTERTAINMENT’s (the company that EA was so proud to have stream ads into Battlefield 2142) “subtle and dignified” ads from Planetside:
Ok, I get it, you hate the advertising industry. I’m not advocating advertising in any way shape or form. You never answered my question though, what makes games so special. Every form of entertainment wether it is free or not, is saturated with advertising. What makes games so different that they should be exempt? Other than the fact that they cost more?
In case you guys missed it in the other thread. Here’s one of MASSIVE ENTERTAINMENT’s (the company that EA was so proud to have stream ads into Battlefield 2142) “subtle and dignified” ads from Planetside:
Man, I wish Blizzard had put some of those up in Orgrimmar and Ironforge…
It’s already been said: other media use advertising to subsidize costs and lower the price to the end consumer. EA, on the other hand, is using advertising to make more money. Let me say it again, just to make sure: every other thing you consume that contains advertising is either free or substantially cheaper than it would otherwise be because of it. So the question for you is: what makes games different?
Don’t product placements, especially those that are particularly arbitrary and obviously inserted into the script without real reason for the plotline, in movies and television shows bug you? How about that Chrystler 300M commercial for the Harrison Ford’s Firewall movie? Could you tell whether it was a movie or a celebrity doing a short clip movie-quality commercial for a car? How about everytime you saw a Mac OS 9 box or laptop being used to “hack computers”? (Independence Day comes to mind, woo use drag and drop to kill the aliens computer magically! Praise Apple, their insanely great computers can talk to ANYTHING!)
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Edit: Just in case you didn’t put 1 and 1 together, this sort of thing BREAKS IMMERSION in games, especially those where the enjoyment can be primarily derived from the setting/theme/character of the art, sound, dialogue, interactions, etc.
What makes them exempt is the fact that, for 25 years, they had little to no advertising in them. The reason being is that they don’t rely at all on advertising money to develop. This is nothing but a pure profit money grab, with no cost benefit to the end consumer. Games make a profit just fine from their high price tags. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a game industry right now.
And the only way it’s going to stay ad-free is if we bitch to high heaven about any sort of advertising being put in them. Having an attitude like “well, everything else has ads, so why not games too!” is exactly why advertisers are able to shove their crap into our faces.
Look what happened to Starforce. Everyone complained, and eventually all major developers were forced to drop it. If you translated your comment about advertising in games to copy protection, we’d still have Starforce. “Starforce sucks! It’s ruining my game”. “So what. Every game has protection, deal with it”.
The bottom line is $50-$60 retail games don’t need advertising money.
I’ll take the opposite tack… there are things with advertising, more and more, which do NOT subsidize their consumption. Specifically, ads in movie theaters. WTF. I’d like to meet the braintrust that first thought of this. “Hey! We’ve got a captive audience, LET’S SELL THEM CRAP!”. The fact that we actually paid for the privilege of sitting in that theatre? Irrelevant!
I find that unacceptable in movies, and it’s one of the reasons I rarely see movies in the theatre any more. Why should it be acceptable in games that I pay for as well?
After the first time I paid $12, sat down, lights dimmed, and I had to sit through 10 minutes of Army, Coke and Chrysler ads, I haven’t been back to a theater since.
Movies dont put ads in the middle of the movie. Books dont have adverts at all.
If gandalf interrupted his speech at rvendell to talk about the refreshing power of sprite, we’d go nuts. If Darth Vaders armour had a nike tick on it we’d go nuts.
Even movie studios realise that adverts kill immersion during the game.
Right, so if there is advertising heavily through a game it better be free or substantially cheaper than an advertising free game. I’m not paying HBO dollars to get NBC primetime amount of advertisements.
To be perfectly fair the comparison here should not be to the developer of the game, as the advertisements you experience at the movie theatre are from the venue provider itself and NOT from the movie studio. I’ve been to several movie theatres that DO NOT place m/any ads before a movie showing, they just happen to be independent and/or college theatres. Ads before the movies are more similar to GameSpy injecting ads in your game server browser, or Nvidia/ATI making you sit through their pre-game bumper “Plays Best on…” ads.
Yeah, since moving to Austin I’ve gone to a few shows at the Alamo Drafthouse, which play ads for their own movie events (and are thus at least somewhat relevant) instead of 10 minutes of car ads.
Plus I’ve found I’m much more tolerant of almost anything if I’m given beer.
That is actually squarely on the developer/publishers shoulders. You better believe they get subsidies from ATI/Nvidia to put these splash screens in front of their games. Even the Gamespy examples falls on the developer/publishers as well. They decided to not take the time to code their own game browser, so they decided to slap Gamespy into their product and make the end user deal with the ads.
That’s cool. I would imagine that if I was drinking a lot of beer and some little kid was kicking the back of my seat during a showing or some stupid person talking during a movie, like they seem to always do when I go to a megaplex theatre, I would probably just punch them in the throat.
