Google Brings Ads To Games, Game Ads To YouTube 108
Reuters reports that YouTube will be partnering with Amazon and iTunes to provide the ability to purchase games and songs that are in or related to YouTube's hosted videos. For example, watching footage from Spore will bring up a link to purchase the actual game through Amazon. The sales revenue will be shared. In related news, Google has launched a public beta for their in-game advertising software based on Adsense. "Google is initially targeting the sweet spot for its technology: games based in Adobe's Flash platform and which run in a web browser with no download. ... [Christian Oestlien, senior product manager at Google] said that Google's advertisers can use the software to insert ads into games or videos for YouTube, making the ads more versatile. Developers of games can use Flash software development kits to designate the points in a game that make an 'ad request.'"
Ads in Games (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in 1999 myself and some friends actually looked at creating a networked gaming infrastructure company, not creating games but focusing on the bit that (back then) games companies really sucked at, the actual software infrastructure required for distributed games. One of the things we proposed in there was the ability to serve targeted advertisements into games.
Trouble was in 1999 that everyone wanted to fund .coms and advertising revenue was just about eyeballs so targeting wasn't required apparently.
Expect this to very quickly go from Flash games into any game that connects to the internet, its a great new revenue stream for companies.
Re:Ads in Games (Score:5, Insightful)
Expect this to very quickly go from Flash games into any game that connects to the internet, its a great new revenue stream for companies.
Why does it have to connect to the internet?
...
Isn't Burger King releasing games [slashdot.org] funded entirely by Burger King with Burger King themes in them? (Did I mention Burger King?)
When I was tiny and we had our first x86 machine, I recall receiving a free 7-up game from the local supermarket that was a 3.5 diskette. You played spot, the 7-up mascot in an Othello rip off against another person next to you or the computer. Is this any different?
Would I be shocked to see ad funded games hitting the shelves? Nope. I wouldn't be surprised to see free discs & downloads of games where a car company makes a racing game or a soda company makes a mario party-ish game
I'm not too hip on this idea though, the last thing I want is more advertisement in my life. They seem like a distraction & waste of time. But since they fund a lot of what I do for entertainment, they're here to stay!
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Isn't Burger King releasing games funded entirely by Burger King with Burger King themes in them? (Did I mention Burger King?)
Behold, McKids! [wikipedia.org]
Re:Ads in Games (Score:4, Interesting)
Its not about add funded games its about using games to sell targeted advertisements. All of those billboards in sports games and the "realistic" FPS games, perfect for slapping on an ad targeted just at YOU. Others in the game will see different adverts on exactly the same space.
Advertiser funded is old hat, this is about turning games into virtual billboard environments
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Hey, I had that game when I was a kid. I never got it to work because of driver problems but I kept wondering what the hell it was about. The config screen seemed cool at that age.
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Re:Toyota has done this (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised to see free discs & downloads of games where a car company makes a racing game
You wouldn't be surprised to know that Toyota did this with their Yaris [xbox.com] game. It is a free download on Xbox Live.
The problem is that if you got it for free you still paid too much. I'm not saying that this type of thing can't work, I'm just saying that this particular example was a bad game.
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Isn't Burger King releasing games [slashdot.org] funded entirely by Burger King with Burger King themes in them? (Did I mention Burger King?)
It's a fine establishment! Plus, did you know that you can get a refill on any drink? For free!?!
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Expect this to very quickly go from Flash games into any game that connects to the internet, its a great new revenue stream for companies.
I think you might be a little overly pessimistic here. Flash games are free content. Most other internet games aren't. Jumping that barrier would be akin to commercials going from broadcast TV over to HBO -- possible but less likely and with a much greater backlash.
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another great way to target advertising at kids. get 'em young as they say.
it's rather sad that most American school children are more familiar with corporate brands [commercial...ldhood.org] than they are with academic concepts like arithmetic or geography.
advertising is not something we need more of in our society.
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Don't you wish you had patented the idea.
Well if you don't, I still wish I had.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
Got this out of a cereal box several years back.
Basically a shooter running off the Doom engine with a anthropomorphized cereal piece as the main character.
It was/is actually a good game (maybe because they used an already-successful Doom base.
(Sorry, forgot my password, not gonna dig it up right now, I'm KingAlanI)
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Nowhere. Just die, or charge more.
I don't know, I personally would rather see an ad or two than pay more for something, but that's just me.
If a game was released for $20 with ads or say $40 without ads, which would you buy? And don't be stubborn just to prove your point, I will know if you are lying. :P
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I understand that a business' only objective is to profit, but there seems to be no end to the greed.
I have been purchasing and playing video games since the 70's straight through until as recent as last week. You know as well as I do that this will really get out of hand and f
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And don't be stubborn just to prove your point, I will know if you are lying.
Honestly, I would buy the more expensive one if it had no adverts, if those were the prices. I really don't like them, and I've avoided games with in-game adverts before and quit playing games I'd bought when they had advertising added (Counterstrike on Steam).
Realistically though, if they did that there'd be a full-price version with adverts and overpriced version without, rather than an actual saving by going with the ads. In that case, I'd probably just pass up the game.
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I really cannot wrap my head around the concept that someone would stop playing a game that they purchased, and enjoyed, just because of in-game ads.
Ok, I'll admit that ads in Mario or Megaman would be, well, out of place. However a game like Counterstrike where realism is sort of the point, ads can be placed in a realistic fashion, only adding to the realism.
If you have the money to pay extra for such a trivial preference, you really don't need to be complaining.
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I really cannot wrap my head around the concept that someone would stop playing a game that they purchased, and enjoyed, just because of in-game ads.
Purchased and enjoyed, past tense. I bought the game when it didn't have adverts; when they were added, I enjoyed the game less so I stopped playing it. Imagine a game element you find annoying and lame. It's been added to a game you already bought: do you enjoy it just as much as before? No. It's a simple thing to relate to.
However a game like Counterstrike where realism is sort of the point, ads can be placed in a realistic fashion, only adding to the realism.
It could be in some of the levels, but it wasn't done that way. Adverts were large and ugly, prominently tacked onto the environment and score overlay without so much as a border.
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Having never played Counterstrike I cannot argue for in-game ads. I agree that The Temple is a poor location choice for an Intel, or any other, ad.
I also agree that once a game has been purchased, ad-injection is ethically sketchy. However, do you not watch Van Wilder on Comedy Central because of commercials? No, you watch it and enjoy it enough to justify not renting the DVD. I'm just saying that I am personally surprised that games have been largely ad-free for as long as they have been.
Now I know tha
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Uuuggghh!
What do you mean, uuughh? I don't like ads!
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Or by replacing the ads with their ASCII logos and scene videos/music.
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Where would you have us put our ads?
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It depends. If the game is a freebie released over the internet that the author has no other possible revenue stream for, then I have no problem with an ad-supported version like the current trend of MochiAds flash games. If it's a game that I have to pay money for, then yes, Keep Your Fucking Ads Out Of My Games.
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I actually take the strategy of not buying products that are advertised, or alternatively buying products that are advertised the least. I hope this catches on, because we are constantly being inundated with this crap.
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This is what I do as well.
But I'm not precise about it, nor do I try to take into account what parent company a product belongs to or whatever.
Don't ruin the immersion (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I have a breaking point. When Sony Online Entertainment put Jeep ads in Planetside (an alternate galaxy futuristic MMO FPS), it was my breaking point and I quit my subscription. I didn't buy Battlefield 2142 for the same reason: the ads ruined the gameplay immersion.
Ads are OK if they fit into the environment. Otherwise, leave them out. I would rather pay $10 additional to not have gameplay tarnished by ads that stick out like a sore thumb.
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I've been wondering how hard the film industry has been/will be hit with the same, and what affect this will have on genre pictures. You can fit a Burger King add into Iron Man and play it off as a quirky character moment, but you can't really shill for, well, anything in something like The Hobbit.
On the one hand, I want to embrace embedded adds as better than commercial breaks. But only within reason, and I wonder if that will be yet another factor pulling entertainment back towards the main stream.
Re:Don't ruin the immersion (Score:5, Funny)
"Bilbo! Don't sit on the verge like a lump; we must make haste!"
"I'm sorry, Gandalf, but my poor feet aren't meant for such a long journey outside the Shire."
"When my feet ache from a long day's journey, I find relief in Gold Bond medicated powder..."
Works for me. :D
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The Burger King blurb in Iron Man was done very well. It worked with the Tony Stark character they put out and I didn't find any problem believing that Mr. Stark wanted a couple juicy BK Whopper's after getting back from a diet of bad water and who knows what he ate.
That's the whole thing, the advert has to work within the context. They could have put ads on billboards in GTA4 and it wouldn't have bothered me.
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You can fit a Burger King [ad] into Iron Man and play it off as a quirky character moment, but you can't really shill for, well, anything in something like The Hobbit.
Indeed, that's one of the things that ruined my enjoyment of sequels to The Neverending Story: fantasy characters talking about microwave ovens.
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They almost never work well for me.
Some just stand out. The Honda Element in SSX 3 was just sad. It stuck out like a sore thumb, and shouldn't have been there.
The objects in Pikmin 2 fit in pretty well, but I think I would have been happier if they were greeked instead of having the real brand names on them. Finding the Duracell and seeing Olimar's little comment was cute, but any battery that looked like a Duracell would have worked, we didn't need the real brand name.
People can debate over ads in sport
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As long as the billboards explode like anything else that gets hit with high explosives, I'll be fine with them.
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I agree with you 100%. Games are about immersion. I loved fight night games. Fight night 3 pissed me off. The bk guy as your corner man? This knockout brought to you by bk? Fuck you! It actually made me start hating BK. Now, under armor? Underarmor is a boxing brand, right? No problem. I can buy nike shoes and underarmor mouth guards that are actual products. Sort of immersing, isnt it?
Problem is advertising as you said only is immersing in present day games. They could prob do a future setting brand logo
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You're correct; product placement is somewhat more palatable in theory, but I've yet to see a game that had product placement where the placement didn't also suck (Splinter Cell's Sony Ericsson=ummm, what?).
Obviously, gamers' opinions will change when some major ad company (Google, maybe) gets behind an AAA
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The really strange thing about all of this. There is absolutely no real way of validating that the adds were of any value or that they had opposite effect and actually put people off. The big thing is not to sell products but to convince sellers that the adds work and that they buy the space.
So you can imagine the sales demo, where the people selling add space demonstrate the screens where the adds appear and waffles on how the gamer must focus and see the add, of course the naive person buying the add s
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I would rather pay $10 additional to not have gameplay tarnished by ads that stick out like a sore thumb.
Either that or the ad-infested game could maybe cost 10$ less to begin with, which makes me wonder how much money they will be making with those ads anyway? More than 10$ per player? 20$ per player? More than the 50$ they won't get from me because I won't buy the game at all due to those ads?
Since they probably want to cover the losses they make to "pirates," I guess they made contracts on a per-play basis that will include pirated versions. So, hopefully for them the release groups play along because the
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The BF2142 situation got blown out of proportion.
Remember the first Slashdot articles about it were basically that they collect your personal information and give it to the advertisers, it was not true and the developers came out to even discuss. Of course Slashdot never had the followup article and allow the team to answer some of those points, so they were backed into a corner and the fud had already tainted the game. It was more fear mongering with the privacy info that got everybody worked up and a lot
Re:Don't ruin the immersion (Score:4, Insightful)
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If this becomes popular, will it limit the worlds that games appear in?
I'm a little worried all games be locked into near-present day urban environments where billboards make sense rather than lose the precious in-game billboards (or destroy the realism by having inter-dimensional Space-orcs considering Geico).
It'd be as bad as if all first person shooters had the same dirty grey-brown environments :)
Could be ok (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to see it done right. Seeing as how google really took advertising away from the banner ad approach with the dominance of their contextual text ads, perhaps they will get this in-game advertising right.
What is right?
1) Don't interrupt me. Really. Figure out how to work it in, but not weigh it down or intrude.
2) Make it useful. I don't care for how it looks cheesy when you go to a vending machine in a game and all it has is fake product garbage. Normal advertising you encounter daily, like vending machines, is unobtrusive but also raises brand awareness while it provides some realism to the game.
3) Again, don't interrupt me. Stay out of the way, and a whole industry won't crop up around you trying to remove your ad content. (popup blockers)
Bottom line, I don't think ads coming into games is that bad of a thing, but they have to be done tastefully and not detract from the title your playing.
As Seen in World of Warcraft... SPIDER EGGS (Score:4, Funny)
EXT. Stonetalon Mountains (North West of Orgrimmar)
ENTER: Mackror the Mighty Orc Huntar
Mackror (yells): "I HAS CAPTURED 9/15 SPIDAR DEEPMOSS EGGS!!! FEW MORE TO GO!!!"
[ENTER: Homing Pigeon]
(makes pigeon crap on Mackror, sputters around... and lands on Macror's shoulder)
Mackror: "ARGH WAT! A NOTE!" (reads note)
"AIG Insurrance of Ogrimmar!!!! HAS GOLD. Invest to protect your new QUEST ITEM: DEEPMOSS SPIDER EGGS from decay and theft. Insure your home with the most ROCK SOLID insurance company in all Kalimdor!! We would never need to be bailed out like other institutions."
Mackror: "ARGH NO!!! LIARS!!!!!" (eats bird)
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"Bottom line, I don't think ads coming into games is that bad of a thing, but they have to be done tastefully and not detract from the title your playing."
This is really key, I really hope they don't screw it up but knowing the asshats that run game publishers...
They have to be in good taste and fit the context, although I really wonder about the context of having ads in say like WoW or other fantasy games when technically it's a 'pre-technological' world.
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Get ready for the Themed ads. Are you in a fantasy setting? Get ready for ye old Coke Ale. O.k. really only "true" old style beer and their ads should show up there. I have no idea what that would be. Anything from the early 1920s up could have all sorts of old style coke ads. Heck, Coke could make a massive list of their entire ad history and the various times each has run. Then they'd re-run those same ads in each of the games set in each era. If you have a 1960s game, you get 1960s coke ads. If the game
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It's a game set in a modern city (be it a comic book-type one), they're advertising is opt-out (there's an option in game to turn it on/off, effective next time you zone -- it defaults to on, so it's technically opt-out), and the advertisements are only applied to things that were fake-brand advertisements beforehand (the original city design has billboards in all the main parts of the city, and posters at ground level, at about the right kind of mix and frequency to be realistic.
Fear the larsen... (Score:1)
games to ads? (Score:5, Funny)
Videos (Score:1)
ads into games or videos for YouTube
Does this imply I'll have to watch video adverts on youtube?? I RTFA and didn't find anything to that effect.
DRM 1 Star Mob (Score:5, Insightful)
Ouch. Amazon might not be the best place to try and sell spore...
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
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What's the point? (Score:1)
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but they will be noticed when you've stopped for some reason... be it sneaking around a corner in shooters, or crashing/finishing in racing games..
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Ads and MMOs (Score:4, Interesting)
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So what Ads do you propose for WoW?
"Enl4rge your Sword"?
Remember: In-game ads != during gameplay ads (Score:2, Interesting)
Nearly every discussion of in-game ads works under the assumption that in-game ads means ads plastered all over the game world.
This is true in some cases, but is a narrow view of the in-game ads concept as a whole.
There is a lot of real estate for ads to inhabit that is outside of the game world. Start-up screens (wedged between the ten different developer/publisher/middleware/etc splash screens). Menu areas (like the Samsung logo in the Perfect Dark Zero menus). Loading screens (like the Red Bull ones in W
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And then there are people like my aunt who doesn't even remove the sticker from the lid of her laptops. There are all kinds of people... advertising inside games will be quite successful with many, many people. Especially the online flash browser games.
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Although I wouldn't expect much from MMO gamers since they'll usually grind on anything.
If my Pizza Hut and WoW accounts could be linked.. (Score:2)
I would be an even more happy gamer.
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Google's too big (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm finding another search engine. I know it sounds like an over reaction- but the way I figure it, the more funding google gets the more money it has to inject into tracking us and injecting ads into every possible place. I understand that whatever engine I use they're gonna spend money on trying to sell me something, or make something I will buy in the future- but I'd prefer to give my views to someone spending their money on something else. Naturally it's not gonna be microsoft- but its certainly not going to be google.
The question is: is it too late?
Anyone who uses mozilla uses google, google is now a VERB, they own youtube, and they serve ads on virtually every web page. On top of that, they're getting a base of users for their browser AND they have a suite of office applications.
People started saying when is too much a long time ago, well I think now.
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Revenue shared between WHO? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The revenue will be shared"
between amazon and google. GREAT!!!!
then what's left will be given to the publisher who will make some deductions then give a small chunk to the developer.
Enough of this crap.
If you like a game, ANY game, then do the games industry a favour, and CUT OUT THE MIDDLEMAN. Many of the games on sale through online stores are also sold direct from the developer. If they offer that as an option, please take it. The developer will get between 2 and five times as much money from the sale. And you KNOW they got paid.
Middlemen are making more money from gaming than the developers who create them. This kind of bullshit is getting worse and worse.
Marketing for Free (Score:2)
To answer my own question,
yes, Slashdot is the marketing arm of Google now. [slashdot.org]
How much does Google pay you guys for this kind of coverage?
could be cool (Score:2)
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A new market indeed... (Score:2)
No download! (Score:1)
games based in Adobe's Flash platform and which run in a web browser with no download
Flash apps work without downloading Flash these days? That's pretty damn sweet.
Adpocalypse now (Score:1)
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http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=960031&cid=24966315 [slashdot.org]
TOLD YOU SO
MORONS