In-Game Advertising

Developers could take advantage of the game 'Down-Times': TitleScreens, Loading, Pause, Game Over with Advertisements for their products. Post your thoughts and opinions.

Didn't Jaguar XJ220 have 'em in-game on billboards? Namco had "house ads" in Rage Racer, too. Generally speaking, I'd rather not see advertisements in games, though - 'tis fairly annoying (EDIT: It's not like they're cheap, games, and I like to think that I've coughed up enough cash to keep myself from being bombarded by advertising. Not that 3rd parties seem to have any faith in the value of placing ads in games... phew!)

What Sledge said.

I hate the idea, Frank - from an end-users' point of view.

Could be acceptable if it was "product placement" style rather than outright advertising. {Although I still think that this can ruin the suspension of disbelief in Holywood movies... I find myself thinking "I bet the producers did a deal with MacDonalds", rather than thinking "Cool, they just drove a spaceship through a fast food restuarant!"}

William Gibson did this very well in his Neuromancer trilogy - the product namedropping enhanced the near-future feel. But I absolutely hate the school of writing that thinks that mentioning haute couture products turns a pile of self-indulgent wish fantasy into classic literature... Think Danielle Steele, etc.

in-game advertising = horrid. I bought the damn thing after enduring countless adverts, now let me play it!

What Black said.

I myself have only ever seen Ubisoft & EA do such a thing on more then one occasion, with "In your face" advertisements, where they self-promote their products...and on the rare occasion, someone elses product. (wtf does a real body spray advertisement have to do with Burnout3?)

And they're all placed so badly, ruining the immersion factor, cant see why terrorists from across the world would be running Brothers in Arms on their PC while I sneak around them as Sam Fisher and hack the system, just to later see an AMD64 logo appear on it when I'm done.

It seems to be more of a publisher-enforced thing though.

If the game did indeed get much cheaper I wouldn't mind a few ads in the loading screens. Those screens are there anyway, having an ad on them or not. Point is like in the message I quoted, the games do not get one single penny cheaper of all these advertisement. At least not to games which do NOT have these ads. And then I do start to mind. Since games with ads are as expensive as game without them, it's very clear how companies are just fooling us getting the money out of our pockets and get away with that.
(We are so foolish to buy it anyway)...


Oh, I got an ad for a really horrible movie when waiting for a movie in Harry Potter Style. (it was not Harry Potter itself btw, even though I love that stuff. Don't really remember which movie it was).

The trouble is it counters the main reason for upgrading hardware... namely performance. My snazzy new (and unfortunately hypothetical) Alienware rig might load really, really quickly if it weren't for the adverts that are contractually obliged to be present onscreen for at least ten seconds etc

What I propose is relevant advertisements about games. Product Placement could be done also but, not sure how one go about advertising a software product. A physical product requires much less effort, IMHO.

In-Game advertisement is may not be a standard today, but, I have hunch it will be in the future. Theres no need for indies to wait for the Commerical Companies to start doing this first.

As a game publisher I want to sell games. If this is option is cost effective and puts my products in front of potiential customers I will use it.

What, even if it makes them hate your guts and vow to never buy one of your products again? Games, if they're any good, are played for hours... the potential for the player to become sick of the sight of any in-game advertised produce is vast.

Allow me to repeat: "take advantage of the game 'Down-Times': TitleScreens, Loading, Pause, Game Over"

If this is a concern the Developer could provide the option to turn them off or provide and incentive for viewing them. There is more than one way to skin a ...

Well you had moved on to talking about "product placement"... if by that you didn't mean placing products in the main body of the game (as with film) then that's not really product placement at all.

Ultimately I don't see anywhere to squeeze in adverts that wouldn't annoy or be defunct: In-game they're too repetitious; During loading they will artificially slow down getting to the gameplay, as if sitting through a plethora of company logos and FMV wasn't already bad enough; During the pause screen your player is, by definition, already looking away doing something else.

There are goods and bads in ads in games.

The bads. They're hated. Ads are always hated. In TV shows, along the street, on the radio. You name it, people hate it. And in a certain perspective I can't proove them wrong.

But this commercial about ads i a newspaper is also true:
(It's a translation from Dutch, and the old Guilder on that time was about $0.45

On that oment you see the price of F1,50 raise to F15.
15 guilders for a newspaper is extremely expensive, trust me.

So maybe you get my point. Commercial games are (at least in Europe) extremely expensive. If ads could make them affordable, I could be for it, but, of course. They may NEVER annoy the player. You see, placing a real ad on a billboard in a racing game. You can see it as an evil ad. But also as some kind of virtual reality, since at a real race those billboards are there as well. That makes two files in one hit, as we dutchies say. Too bad, racing games never got one penny cheaper because of that, and that disqualifies them of being allowed to place those ads there. But (for me) they are not annoying when it solely comes to the game play. (Now I must say that I seldom play racing games, but in the few times THAT I play them, those billboards do not annoy me).

I think what Sledge, and nearly all of us, are afraid for, is overkill. Internet advertisement is the perfect example of how advertising went into overkill. But maybe that's an extreme example.

But it's very clear that the game industry may never take an example of that. But there are games who did it the right way. Take "Space Quest 5" which was sponsored by the communication company "Sprint". You do see "Sprint" on the spaceship screen after hailing. It's only on the screen for 2 seconds, so it's gone before you actually realize it was on the screen.

I think I'm going to take the middle ground, and just trying to analyze it from an objective manner. But indeed, if commercials are going to be in a game that way that it gets annoying (which you'll get easily, trust me), I will also object their coming.

The hit-driven, winner-takes-all business model is maintained by the biggest players to lock-out competitors, not because games have to be £40. The last thing EA wants is for games to sell at an impulse-puchase price-point that would negate the advantages of its vast marketing budget and licensed deals - the only reason for such companies to consider in-game adverts would be to push profits up, not prices down.


There's a limit to how much advertising you can put into games that run on basic hardware and come on disks. Don't confuse good judgement with technical constraints.

Makes sense if your in the business of developing and selling your game...

Tricrokra's advocacy is based on the notion that prices aren't artificially high (they are), that games publishers want to lower prices (they don't) and that the financial gains from advertisers would be passed on to the customer (they wouldn't). That there would be no benefit to the player from a move to carrying adverts was the fairly obvious point being made - we all know companies have to turn a profit.

I've been playing through Freelancer lately.

(It's actually made me realize: RPGs the MS have a big part in always start off too slow...).

I absolutely DESPISE how the main character's favourite drink is named after a Microsoft joy stick.

i'd prefer the ads to be part of the game... like if there's a city scene, the billboards in the scene might contain ads...

the computer that teh antagonists uses could clearly have an Apple logo on it...

the characters could drink Coke or Pepsi...

if there are airplanes in the scene, a Delta or United paint scheme...

... something like this would seem more the way i would approach it.

but you gotta solicit products that would appeal to the genre that the game is aimed at... that would make the makers more inclined to pay you for it...

... i think :)

--Mike

You know they wouldn't just swig it like characters who drink unbranded cola, though. They'd savour it in order to make sure it was visible for x number of seconds, filling a pre-agreed and significantly large portion of the screen and making you wait. Ten minutes after you finished playing the residual word "Coke" would still be burnt into your monitor.

The point is not to make games cheaper. Games are priced at whatever price the market will bear. The point is increased revenue for publishers, and by extension their shareholders.

Game down times are already annoying enough. They detract from immersion, and game enjoyment, and to add insult to injury, are in many cases superfluent. You want to make them more artificial by adding real world advertising?

I don't think you'll have a lot of luck with that.

Product placement is already in games. All the laptops in F.E.A.R. are alienware. Matrix - Path of Neo, has lots of Intel Extreme and nVidia in-game branding. It's cool the first time, even the second time. But after 100 it starts getting a little boring. Besides which - good luck getting a company who want to be associated with the bad guys. Converse - helps terrorists run away.

No. I didn't think so either.

I actually like ads in games ... it makes them seem more relevant and interconnected with the real world. I always loved them in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Turtles eat Pizza Hut) etc... when I was a kid.

Yah, I don't mind product placement either.
In fact, I like it. As long as it doesn't take away from the realism or seem like not only the United States intents to expand itself into the entire universe but ALSO Microsoft is going to start brewing alcoholic beverages.

You must have loved "I, Robot" then...

Duke nukem spoof ads were cool.

I robot book has no product placement thank god.

In my opinion ads in games are OK for -free- trial versions, or unregistered share-ware. An occasional nag-screen between certain levels or after closing the game advertising the full version and/or other products from the same company is perfectly acceptable.

It adds incentive for the player to pay for the registered version, and pays for the time and effort of its creators.

However, in a *paid* for product, I don't think there is any place for such stuff. Even when it happens during a loading screen where the player is waiting 'anyway', I don't think the player will experience that the same way -- it makes them feel like you consider them a cash-cow that owes you something, rather than someone you appreciate for supporting your game in the first place.

Especially because we are being bombarded with advertising in all other media, I consider it extra annoying when I do have to look at them in a normally 'ad-free' environment. I personally would rather never buy anything from the place again rather than rushing out to buy whatever they are advertising. This is the exact same reason that I never buy anything from door-to-door salesmen or telemarketers, no matter how good their prices might be -- I am *not* going to encourage anyone for invading my privacy that way.

Anyway, obviously you want them to know about your other products, but I believe that you should simply give the buyer the opportunity to check it out, rather than making it mandatory -- For example, by:

1) Adding a link to your webpage in your game

2) Adding a menu-item in your main menu where you may show-case some of your other products -- but make it the players active choice to check this out, do NOT force it upono them

3) Maybe add a paragraph advertising one or more of your other products on the thank-you-for-ordering email when someone buys a game, as in 'other games you may be interested in' -- possibly even with a discount code if they order one in the next -x- days or something.

4) You can do the same as a (rotating) signature at the bottom of your support e-mail messages

5) Adding something generic like 'check out our other great games at http://www.wherever.com at the end of your credit roll

6) Some games make fun of themselves, by using posters of some of the previous versions of the game hidden among background graphics. In some types of games like point-and-click adventures, this can be funny when done correctly and with extreme moderation... But the problem is that it should never feel like an ad targeting the player.

7) Add some info about your other games in the documentation/manual that comes with a game

In my opinion all of those are pretty common and accepted, but interstitial advertising is too intrusive and likely does more harm than good in a registered paid-for commercial program.

(Think about it -- if it really was such a great idea, don't you think *everyone* would be doing it? they're not -- for a reason.)

If it would be in replacement of actually buying the game, I wouldn't have a problem, in fact I prefer it that way, something like public tv, here you are, public games.
If I have to pay and then spend loading times or whatever seeing ads, I got a nice line for that game my education prevents me from saying.

Ads in games already happens and have been around for a long time. Adding them to loading screens isn't the way forward, intergrating them into the game is.

In the sims there are expansion packs that let you add coke drinks dispensors. In Splinter Cell there are sprite and Reebok ads on the billboards and graffiti throughout. If you check out Switch Wakeboarding on shockwave.com you will see they have ads on billboards and ramps throughout the course.

I am very much against ads in general and have a very strict set of rules on the adblock plugin I use in Firefox so I rarely see any ads when online. But in my opinion ads in games are fine as long as they don't interupt the game.

To add to what Ben said... Any sports style games in reality have ads in them, even ones set in the future, so adding billboards, flashing screens etc advertising stuff could actally be adding to the realism (of flying a methane powered space bicycle around a track made of penuts [or something]?!)...

I don't mind adverts, unless I have to sit and do nothing whilst I watch them.