Ad Fad?

I happened to run across some forum traffic this week where some game players expressed their objections to the intrusion of the real world into their game worlds. Yes I'm talking about the the world's third oldest profession... advertising. A few players are irked that some game companies dare to make you pay for the game and still put ads in them.

This complaint will sound familiar to anyone who's been around since the birth of cable television, which everyone expected to be advertising-free because we were paying for it. Most of us got over that, and the people who grew up with a 200-channel multi-function remote control as their baby sitter probably never thought there was anything wrong because for them that's the way it's always been. In fact, gamers have been submitted to in-game advertising for years. Anyone who's played an EA sports game in the past 5 years has been submitted to ads in football stadiums, company logos on soccer jerseys and branded merchandise to buy for their golfer - all in the name of making the game more realistic. Likewise for racing games, where players complain about any lack of brand name vehicles or items to pimp their rides with. Someone has to pay to use these brands and that gets passed along to you, the game buyer.

Bear in mind, these new in-game advertisements are not going to be intrusive on the game play. The advertisers know that players will reject that, so don't expect to see pop-up ads showing up in the middle of your sniper scope or a commercial interruption of your latest RTS campaign to sack Rome. Instead, the ads are integrated into the reality of the game environment - billboards on walls, brand names on vending machines and branded merchandise on shelves in virtual stores. The technology is such that the ads can now change over time which is actually more true to our "real" world where billboards get replaced to promote the latest record album, or one brand supplants another in the quicky mart because the owner got a better deal to carry Coke instead of Pepsi ("I miss Pepsi machine...").

If you want to impact the game industry's pricing structure, rather than get bent out of shape over the games with ads that charge you for their game, support the ones that charge less or make themselves available freely such as Anarchy Online where you get free software and don't pay a monthly online fee if you play the version that receives in-game advertising. For more information on in-game advertising topics and companies, you can start by checking out the Advertising In Games Forum site.