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There’s a couple of threads going on at Quarter to Three discussing Battlefield 2142, and specifically its alliance with IGA Advertising, and thus the ability to enjoy tasty Fanta ads while defending Earth from Zur and the Ko-Dan Armada or whatever.
In-game advertising is not a trend I’m particularly happy with. Specifically, when it’s used not as a means of defraying expenses, but as an additional revenue stream. With most games that have this “product placement”, the game itself isn’t any less expensive.
Anarchy Online, and now Planetside are both notable exceptions, having free-to-play modes and in-game advertising. In Anarchy Online’s case, paying subscribers aren’t displayed these ads, so there actually is something of a quid pro quo; an advertiser-supported version of the game without subscription fees. Planetside, on the other hand displays in-game ads to both paying and non-paying subscribers. And in both, the ads are sometimes wildly, wildly out of sync with their respective game worlds:
Now, I know that fighting for the suspension of disbelief is a dying creed in an online world where people argue about whether or not it’s worth going for a critical hit chance of 9% in lieu of a 10% chance to avoid stuns. But still, this bothers me on a very fundamental level, for two seperate yet somewhat related reasons.
The first reason, as I mentioned, is storytelling. Basically, once you have Motely Crue rocking your world, you’ve pretty much given up on any pretense of having your own story. You’ve sold it for a mess of pottage (and Motley Crue’s pottage? Pretty damned messy). You no longer care about a coherent user experience; you’ve sublet it out to a “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” ad campaign.
The second, and more important to my mind, is in service. People are paying for a game. They should not then become mineable revenue streams – they are customers who have paid for a service. They should not become commodities. Yet in selling out ad space within our games, we as game creators are commodifying our customers. We are saying that their worth is such that we’re willing to plop in an ad and make a few microcents more every time they log in. In so many words, we’re saying: Hey, we’re really greedy.
And it’s not just games. My XM radio (that I pay a subscription for) plays Cialis ads on supposedly ad-free stations. When I go see a movie, I have to sit through an ad I don’t want to see (for Coke or something similarly unrelated) before seeing the ads I do want to see (the “Coming Attractions” reel). We are becoming a commodified society. Every blank space is virgin territory for the marketers to move in and paint with an appeal for auto insurance quotes.
Which, ironically enough, is a large part of what I’m trying to take a vacation from by playing games. Go figure.
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about 4 years ago
Yeah well so the industry is finally being honest with the world and itself? You say that like its a bad thing. Mean come on lets be real: If there weren’t gold in the hills there wouldn’t be prospectors. That said you’ll never have gold without the prospectors.
about 4 years ago
Your blog has become much more interesting (read: better) ever since you left Mythic.
about 4 years ago
I have no problem with in-game ads if they don’t harm suspension of disbelief (i.e. they aren’t too far out of the context of the game world) and if they are for the benefit of the game in some way.
For example, if it keeps a game alive or if it allows players to have a free-to-play option, then they can be good things (as both the company and the players benefit).
about 4 years ago
Here’s the biggest danger of increased advertising: All advertising is intended to make you want that which you do not currently have. As we are constantly bombarded with these messaging, is it wonder why so many of us are less and less happy despite having more and more stuff? No matter where we go or what we do, people are trying to convince us to want more things.
about 4 years ago
Therein lies your glass ceiling.
about 4 years ago
The adding of in-game advertisements to Planetside was THE reason I left. If it was a completly free game, yeah you gotta pay the bills, and that happens through advertising. For people that pay the box and monthly fees it’s a marketing abomination on the order of the DivX DVD player.
about 4 years ago
I dont know man… those Fanta girls are pretty hot.
about 4 years ago
If advertising didn’t have some effect on the populace then it wouldn’t be such a whopping huge industry. Look at the average savings of an American, it’s in the negative! Of course, buying too much useless crap may be the least revolting effect of consumer-grade propaganda; American culture hasn’t exactly been stellar these past few decades.
about 4 years ago
Ooo that is just so wrong! Makes me doubly glad I went with Sirius instead of XM way back when. No commercials on the music channels at all – well, except for the self-advertisements of their other channels which apparently don’t count for some reason.
about 4 years ago
Verruckt = Tony Bennett?
about 4 years ago
If the placement isn’t obnoxious, it might be enjoyable to the players. I.E. in Auto Assault, I belive they were gunna have advertising on the billboards you destroyed/ran over/ignored around the place. That is realistic placement wherase Matrix Online has large billboards near every hardline (place to load your game at) is bad enough, but during the one year anniversary event, it changed shortly beforehand to sponsored by (some shirt brand I don’t know cause it’s a US company) and the players could (for a limited time) buy there own ingame shirt, to show off how much of a consumerist whore they are. Strains the ‘reality’ of the game, but plausable. If you couldn’t guess, I feel SOE killed Matrox Online. Planteside, also owned by SOE, also has advertising, but it really breaks the ‘reality’ of the game.
/rant off
about 4 years ago
In the year 3000, they will beam ads directly into your dreams.
This message brought to you by lightspeed briefs.
about 4 years ago
I don’t see anything wrong with free games that are supported by ad revenue – if it’s free to players (free to download and play), you can let the guys who pay the bills (advertisers) run their stuff.
However, when you start spamming ads to paying subscribers, you will lose subscribers – at least you lose me as a subscriber. I do tolerate the odd ‘lookie, new expansion to this game is out, preorder here’ popup at login or the relevant popup ad for new issue of EON magazine in eve online logins as long as it only shows once per account, but anything ingame breaking the immersion -> I’m out if the game at the same time asks me to pay a monthly fee.
AO is, IMHO, doing this right. And SOE is, surprise surprise, doing it wrong. I hope SOE would already burn in a horrible corporate crash. Their management is sure trying hard to accomplish just that.
about 4 years ago
I’m glad that Lum’s still picking up the torch for storytelling. To my view of things, that’s fundamentally what MMORPGs are about.
That said, even the threat of a company putting in game ads tells you right off the bat that the use of the medium to tell a story has been lost. Don’t kid yourselves by thinking that some in-game advertising breaks the atmosphere more than some other form of advertising. The truth is the world as originally created has been breached.
It is no longer a persistent world, in the McQuaidian sense, anyway.
about 4 years ago
Why do we even need to justify our distaste for ads with reasons like “it breaks immersion” or “it doesn’t fit in with the world.” It’s as if the onus is on the players to prove that they don’t want ads and that if they can’t come up with an airtight argument, ads are good! We should like them!
The hell with storytelling, persistence, or theme as lame excuses for or against ads. I hate ads because ads are ANNOYING in and of themselves, regardless of context. No one who is paying for a service needs to explain why they don’t like ads. I imagine they’d also be a performance drain. (extra dynamically swapped textures and such)
Don’t let a game with in-game ads get any of your money. It won’t get any of mine. That’s the only way your opinion will matter.
about 4 years ago
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that advertising tends to find its way into anything that gets enough attention. Complaining about it at this point will do nothing to make it go away, since advertisers testing the video game venue have seen a sufficient ROI to wet their appetites. There’s really no stopping it now.
I imagine advertisers will let up some after the first few years, which is the period of time it will take the most jaded gamers to develop banner blindness. Once that happens, ROIs will come back to reasonable levels and developers might think twice about the value of the ads versus the cost to gameplay.
about 4 years ago
Advertising starts as a necessary evil, and becomes the status quo. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma; game makers have until recently been cooperating with one another, refusing the in-game ad revenue stream, and customers have benefited; however, as soon as one game caves to the pressure and defects, there’s incentive for others to follow suit. Just like TV.
Sigh.
about 4 years ago
Well as someone above stated, the ONLY way to stop it is to vote with your wallet. But, I fear people want “stuff” more than they want not to be annoyed by ads in games.
It’s like the multitudes of Chicagoans who bemoan Macy’s disposal of the Marshall Fields name but will continue to shop there.
We simply like our stuff too much to make a real stand.
about 4 years ago
I don’t buy games with in-game ads (fair trade cases like AO excepted), and I try to dissuade others from buying them.
And I’d do the same if I’d worked on the game.
That’s how strongly I feel about this.
Madison Avenue: you’re in their world now.
about 4 years ago
I’m glad people have pointed out that “vote with your wallet” is a useless request. If Civilization 5 comes out with advertising, there is no way I can vote with my wallet. I am presented with an ultimatum by the publisher: Take Civ 5 with advertising, or take nothing. There is no legal competitor to get an advertising free version of Civ 5 from.
about 4 years ago
Stormwaltz, I see that as digging your head in the sand, sorry.
Publishers are going to demand adverts in games. What matters is the form. Placing adverts firect from the websites and other sources…is going to be the default unless a deliberate stance is made that games require tailored and appropriate adverts.
Of course, bluntly, for things like the EA sports games this covers nearly everything. If you go to those stadiums in real life, there are adverts. If the company ways to set up an arrangement with EA to same the same placement in their games, that’s…MORE realistic, not less!
Jarnis, given those adverts crash the Eve fronmt end for a number of players, requiring ini file changes to bypass them, I’d hardly describe Eve as “doing it right”.
about 3 years ago
Spammers exist because somebody actually buys the stuff being hawked. We consumers could simply declare that we’re not going to buy stuff that’s advertised in-game or that randomly appears in our inbox.
When it stops working, it’ll stop choking us off from our fun.
about 3 years ago
@Brask Mumei:
In your example, do you really have to have Civilization 5 that badly? Trying to change something comes at a cost. Civ5 isn’t like insulin that a diabetic needs to survive. You have to forego a little entertainment to get a message across. The ‘legal competitor’ would not be an ad-free Civ 5, but another game entirely. Only when ALL games have ads are there no choices left.
about 3 years ago
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