Refreshing Taste of Sprite Invades Anarchy Online

When in-game advertising was announced as a backbone of the new free of charge Anarchy Online, it seemed like this far off concept that we'd see 'someday'. That day is now. Grimwell has a look at Rubi-Ka after the invasion of the marketeers. From the article: "The advertisements were blinking on various billboards, both in cities and in instanced missions. They randomly displayed ads for the upcoming tournament, the "Rubi-Ka rumble", or the above product placements. Obviously, one or the other of them could be existing through time, human cataclysms, and space travel to the future planet of Rubi-ka, but seeing Motley Crue ads did cause me to wonder when I'd see them touring Omni Entertainment." Totally worth it if only for the screenshots.

Ach, Mein Thirsten!

I see the developers were reading up on their Penny Arcade. [penny-arcade.com]

Seriously though, as long as they're able to avoid television commercial-like breaks in the gameplay, I have no problem with this. My biggest gripe with MMO gaming is having to a pay a monthly fee - so much so that I even gave Project Entropia a try (helpful hint: do not play Project Entropia). Since AO got some pretty good reviews, and since it's being offered for the low, low price of free, I'm certainly going to give this one a try.

Re:Ach, Mein Thirsten!

Since AO got some pretty good reviews, and since it's being offered for the low, low price of free, I'm certainly going to give this one a try.

Go ahead and give it a try. It will only cost you the download time. But if you were to ask for my opinion, I

Re:Ach, Mein Thirsten!

Sad isn't it? I got in when they first offered the "grab a free year of playing" thing, and played, dunno, 2 hours total. It's the most boring, trite, laggy crapfest I've seen in a long time. They gave me a free year and I quit after 2 hours. How bloody sa

Re:Ach, Mein Thirsten!

Following up on Japong's post, the whole 'ads in video games' schism was also mentioned in VG Cats [vgcats.com] . . .

Splinter Cell 3...

You have a nice video (which u cannot skip) where Sam fisher jumps into an helico, speaks to his boss and then grabs a pack of AirWaves (Chewing Gums from Wrigley(tm) ) and starts chewing...

full zoom on the pack, etc...

I almost stopped playing at this ti

Speaking of subscription fees

Does anyone actually know what the subscription fee for The Matrix Online is going to be? Feels kind of strange to spend $50 on an MxO box and not actually know how much a month I'm gunna get hit with when they start billing.

As for advertisements in-game

Re:Speaking of subscription fees

Looks like the answer may be [warnerbros.com] https://members.warnerbros.com/registration/us/fee .html [warnerbros.com] Looks pretty standard, $14.99 per month. Or in other words, way too much

Re:Speaking of subscription fees

Way too much for you. But hey, that's the great thing about competition, Anarchy Online can take care of everyone who refused to be gouged, and people like me can pay $15 a month until Warner Bros think they are missing out on too much market share and lo

Re:Speaking of subscription fees

*until Warner Bros think they are missing out on too much market share and lower their prices.*

sadly though, the standard practice is just to axe it at that point.

I'd gladly welcome a different billing to mmorpg's. billing which allowed you to play 1/3th

Re:Speaking of subscription fees

It's 14.99 + the ads for WB movies you get to see on billboards across the city. Ridiculous! That would be like paying for cable TV and having commercials... oh wait.

Stupid

People play games like this because they like to feel immersed in the world in which they're playing. Putting modern advertisements like this into games breaks the immersion (as the article pointed out) and in the end result would (1) cause people to stop wanting to play the game and (2) not make people buy these products. People that feel pissed of at Sprite, for example, because they're interfering in their game are not going to want to buy that product.

- dshaw

Re:Stupid

Yes, people play games to be immersed. AO is a futurepunk (well, more future, less punk) style game. It would have advertisements. Now, if there were a giant ad for TI-82 calculators in Everquest, I may be inclined to agree with you. /pizza doesn't count simply because it's not visibly noticeable. It interferes in no way whatsoever with your EQ2 catassing. Oh, and the people who stop playing the game or refuse to buy the drink/food/condoms because of the ad. Yea, they weren't going to buy the merchandise anyway - and they're certainly the same people who wouldn't play the game if it weren't free. That type of person doesn't deserve fun.

Re:Stupid

If the developers and advertisers tried hard enough you could put ads into pretty much any universe (that has at least a little technology) if you make the ads have to match the world they're in. For something futuristic or modern like Anarchy Online or Ma

Re:Stupid

Or even better.

Put the product in game with stat bonuses.

You pay per stat+

The higher stat items would become more valuable, and people actually using the items in game would begin to associate the product with the bonus.

Player:I need to buy a bunch of

Re:Stupid

Almost half the MMORPG players are female these days ;)

Re:Stupid

"People that feel pissed of at Sprite, for example, because they're interfering in their game are not going to want to buy that product."

Funny, whenever I see a Sprite imitation in a game (like San Andreas), it startles me. It'd be one thing if the gam

Whineplay.

Who gives a fuck about advertising in online games? Particularly when the game is free for you to play. MMOGs, in case you hadn't read the giant writing on the wall, are expensive to run. They need to make up for that cost. That's called advertising. It's easy, generates steady income, and can be targeted. Good for them, bring on more ads. If you can't deal with ads, just don't play the fucking game. You'll be saving companies bandwidth costs anyway. The above paragraph is the longest anyone should be discussing ads in free games.

Re:Whineplay.

Who gives a fuck about advertising in online games? Particularly when the game is free for you to play. MMOGs, in case you hadn't read the giant writing on the wall, are expensive to run. They need to make up for that cost. That's called advertising. It's easy, generates steady income, and can be targeted.

I personally couldn't care less whether a game runs an ad or not... except for this one point the article brought up:

G4 TV, however, is the gaming press and this in-game advertising, new revenues for games, and marketing through them, is news... So, I'm sure we can expect some news coverage of this. Will they actually endorse the game, or publicize this? Would that be a conflict of interest for G4?

I found this to be a valid and worrisome point. Remember DRIV3R? [gamesindustry.biz] Atari basically bought reviews from the gaming press to give the game an inflated review score so it'd sell more copies.

When review scores are "bought", this hurts me, the consumer. In such incentives became commonplace, how am I supposed to trust reviews to tell me which games are good and which aren't, so I know how to spend my hard earned cash?

Interesting

It is worth noting that the advertisements only appear to the free players of the game, not the players paying the monthly fee. With that in mind, I'm ok with it. Heck, I'm happy about it. Finally, one less thing for people to gripe about; The monthly fee for MMORPGs!

Let us hope that they don't get greedy, and that they have enough sales to atleast break even.

There's a fine line here....

It's kind of hard to write this without turning it into some kind of senseless rant :(... oh well.

This is just the first step in a really fine line the developers and advertisements are trying to find. In my opinion, advertisements have gotten way out of control. For example, in my old High School there's a subtle form of advertisement where Coca-Cola gave our school a certain percentage of profit from a bunch of soda machines located around campus. I didn't realize the impact of this when I found out that our school actually had a quota to meet every month before the school could receive their cut. Yep, fat kids just so the school can pay their bills.

OK, so it's not like AO is suffering for cash with their subscribers. It's fairly explicit the advertisements are displayed to non-paying, "customers." But wait! What's this?

Even with atmosphere breaking marketing, would any players actually complain about ads if they resulted in lowered or free subscription costs?

There are two key points in that sentence. The first is the author admits the ads break the atmosphere of the game. Honestly, imagine running around Diablo II and seeing Pepsi soda machines out in the middle of nowhere? Or playing a game that takes place 500 years into the future and flying a, "Doritos Battlecruiser," into a fight? Free or not, I'll go somewhere else, thank you.

The other point he brings up is how players might not complain if the costs are reduced or even removed. If some random company starts putting advertisements into their MMOG, they might not actually lower fees or even make it free for everybody. Subscribe to Cable TV and you'll see what I mean. For example, Cable TV is always loaded with advertisements. I pay $45/month and I still get the same number of advertisements as I would if I didn't pay any money at all. Only difference would be fewer channels to watch. Hell, I'd have to be paying $100/month or more to even hope of getting any channels advert free.

AO might keep this current model. Who knows? But I have serious doubts that other MMOG's or future ones will follow suit. Freebie accounts might have these ugly advertisements. Paid accounts might have more subtle ones, or ones you can control. The point is, the idea of paying cash to get rid of advertisements isn't going to last very long once you have that captive audience and some bean counter figures out how much more profit the company will earn.

If I'm in a game, I'd rather live without the ads. I don't want to be kicking some alien ass in Duke Nukem Forever in a sea of redundant Coca-Cola and McDonalds ads 20 years from now. I get enough of those adverts in real life.

~SavannahLion

Re:There's a fine line here....

Doom 3 could have done with being sponsored by Maglite, though...

Re:There's a fine line here....

Of course, if you can suspend your disbelief long enough to believe that sprite will exist in 27000 years.

Sprite supports anarchy to our children?

But do Sprite, et al, want to be associated with the word "anarchy"? Wait till the reactionary right-wing moralists hear about this - there will be trouble. "Sprite supports evil liberal agenda of societal anarchy! Save the children! Donate to us!"

Didnt take an invasion

For Matrix Online to start including ads. Take a look at this screenshot.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/matrixonline/screen s_6121636.html?page=7 [gamespot.com]

Its ad for the recent film The Jacket, which unsuprisingly was released by a company owned by Time Warner.

Sprites?

Did anybody else read this as they're switching from polygon-based models back to good old traditional sprites? [videogamesprites.net]

But to keep this on topic, I fully support the move for in-game advertising, especially if the article is true:

The discussion of in-game ads last time dealt with the obvious "immersion breaking" factor of /pizza in a fantasy atmosphere, and Anarchy Online (AO) certainly could be in danger of doing this as well... but the difference is that AO's new ad scheme is allowing them to give the basic game FREE, with no subscription fees!!

FREE! Free I said!!

No this isn't just a downloadable trial, and there really isn't any catch... and, yes there's no subscription fees. You don't even require a credit card to join.

(Emphasis mine.) To this, I say: bring it on!

Something else to consider: will this perhaps eventually fund game development? A company has a concept for a game, whether MMO or not, and they get companies to sponsor the development in exchange for prominent placement? So maybe in the next MMO game we'll see the "eBay Auction House" or the "General Motors Inter-zone Transportation" place? It's a bit tasteless to just throw a company name up when it has nothing to do with the theme of the game, but if it's something like The Matrix Online, where the urban sprawl lends itself perfectly for company-sponsored locations -- just like real life -- then why the heck not?

Companies already spend boatloads of money and take a shotgun approach to marketing, spending millions on advertising for a single SuperBowl spot. Why not spend a fraction of that, fund some game development, and get thousands more impressions targeted at the exact kind of audience you want. ATI, nVidia, and Intel to name a few already use this concept when sponsoring game competitions. What better way to reach their exact target market?