Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Games Entertainment

Product Placement in Video Games 345

Posted by timothy from the marketing-devilry dept.
klaun writes: "Yahoo has a Reuters article about product placement in games. Seems that paid placements are no longer that popular because they don't work. The audience is to sensitive to advertisement being 'crammed down their throat.' Wonder what slashdot thinks of product placement." I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Product Placement in Video Games More

Product Placement in Video Games

Comments Filter:

  • Super Monkey Ball (Score:4, Funny)

    by Calle Ballz ( 238584 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:36PM (#2947308) Homepage
    I was playing Super Monkey Ball (extremely fun) for the GameCube the other day...

    and I got this strange desire for a Dole Banana. Wonder if it was something subliminal thrown in...
    • Tracking the effectiveness of advertising in normal media (print, outdoor, broadcast, etc.) is a well-established science. For novel media like video games and the like I don't see how they can collect enough measurable data to reliably dismiss the media as a profitable advertising venue.

      As an example, in 1986 electronic punk band Sigue Sigue Sputnik decided to sell advertising on their album 'Flaunt It'. Yes, there are actually commercials between some of the songs!

      It was a bold and brash move, but well executed. The ads and products (Studio Line hair gel, i-D Magazine, etc.) fit in well with the overall style of the album, and there were some fake ads as well that were humorous and flowed well with the album.

      It's easy to measure how many copies were sold (bootlegging aside), but how do you measure the actual number of effective exposures per album, or the time frame? Personally, to this day I still use exclusively Studio Line, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it's because they had the balls to advertise on one of my favorite albums. No doubt I'm an outlier, but how do you quantify the success of a single advertisement that's still moving product >16 years after it ran?

      As another example, my first exposure to Red Bull was while playing Wipeout XL on the Playstation, almost 2 years before I ever saw the product on store shelves. I freaked when I realized that it was a real drink, and immediately picked some up (good stuff!). Again, it's hard to measure the longevity of new advertising forms.

      -Cybrex
  • It's a very unintrusive form of advertising. I don't see anything wrong with it. It doesn't take away from the game, or perhaps make it more real. I'd rather that than interrupt the game with ads like is becoming the trend on the internet to interrupt viewing of a webpage to show an ad. In a world where ads are being made more and more intrusive and more annoying, this is a refreshing way to advertise a product.
    • perhaps i'm silly, but i really dont like paying for something then having to view advertisements. if i dont pay (ie webpages) i dont mind. when i pay $8 to see a movie and the first 5 to 10 minutes are coke and car commercials not to mention the products placed in the movie i find it kinda irritating. why am i paying to be advertised to?
      • propstoalldedhomiez: It's a very unintrusive form of advertising. I don't see anything wrong with it. It doesn't take away from the game, or perhaps make it more real.

        gimpboy: ... i really dont like paying for something then having to view advertisements.

        I'm with gimpboy on this one. If I paid for it, I expect to be able to put my entire attention into the experience I paid for. If an ad enhances that experience, i.e. by creating a more realistic environment or being parodied as part of a plot line, it's acceptable. But if it's intrusive, it's just stolen my time and vandalized my property, just as if someone had spraypainted it on the side of my house.

        As near as I can tell, if it's intrusive enough to actually sell the product, it's also gone over the line into degrading the experience, whether movie or video game. So that ruins product placement as a legitimate advertising technique, with the possible exception of joke-as-plot-element.
      • My knee jerk reaction is that I agree with you, but what if no ads at a movie meant 16.00 a ticket?
        I mean you could just go into a theater after the premovie ads start.

        I got thrown out of a theater once.
        The usher said "Sir, you not allowed to bring in your own food"
        I said "Your consession stand prices are outrages, and border on criminal, besides, I haven't had a bar-b-cue in a long time."
        --Steven Wright.

  • Paid placement doesn't work... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Peyna ( 14792 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:37PM (#2947311) Homepage
    Paid placement doesn't really work, because frankly, most people don't care what the actor is drinking, or what the writing on the wall says.

    It does help to make movies and games more realistic, since they will be using brands that you recognize, but that's about all it has ever done for me.

    Besides, unless there is something that limits someone from using a certain product in a movie, it's pretty much going to happen anyway, why pay for it? (I might be wrong here, but you don't have pay Pepsi if you want to film a movie and there is a guy in a scene drinking Pepsi, do you?)

    • You don't pay Pepsi, Pepsi pays you. Unless paid placement doesn't work, in which case they might think twice about paying you.
    • It may be realistic, but frankly I find it distracting. While it would be pretty lame to see someone drinking Cola® brand Cola, a made up name that's clever and/or silly can add much more to my enjoyment of a game than the "realism" of product placement. "Fried Chicken Restaurant" isn't the only alternative to "Kentucky Fried Chicken" as suggested in the article. How about something like (off the top of my head, not necessarily a good example) "Kentucky Fried Sushi"? Players would get a giggle out of the blatant yet skewed reference, and no one has to worry about integrity. Admittedly, this would work better in an Earthworm Jim style game that was designed to make gamers laugh to begin with than in "Die Hard: Nakitomi Plaza" (I hope that's just a working title). Mind you, I'm only talking about games here. Movies should stay away from sight-gags as much as possible, but since they're just about the only type of gag you can sneak into most video games, I say bring 'em on!
    • It does help to make movies and games more realistic, since they will be using brands that you recognize, but that's about all it has ever done for me.

      I remember one movie (Mission Impossible?) where two people where discussing things at an English pub. They had amber colored beer in their English pub styled nonik glasses. You know exactly what they're drinking: the pub's extra special bitters. But the glasses where labeled Budweiser. Huh?

      The problem with product placements is that the product companies get their placements *after* the story has been written. Well, in the movie above, the pub scene had probably already been written, and some numbnut who couldn't tell the difference between bitters and piss thought it would be an appropriate spot for Bud.
    • Product placement works in that it creates brand awareness. You may not be attacted to what person X in game Y is eating or drinking, but you will become aware of the product (so that if you ever have a really strong craving one day, you might go out and buy that product). The advertisers are also hoping that I mention the product to a friend or relative who might need the product (ie. I see a Viagra commercial.. and I tell my impotent uncle about it or something).
      • True. I have even heard of tobacco companies who will pay individuals to wear a hat or something that brandishes the company logo, and try to be a visible bystander during an live interview of a race driver or someone of importance. Just that exposure is evidently worth something, especially if the company is a competitor of the racer's sponsor :) .
    • Actually, putting writing and/or images onto walls is quite a popular form of advertising nowadays.
    • I totally agree with your comment that most people don't care, and that it makes the movies and games (and TV shows) more realistic. However, sometimes, (rarely?) these things pay off.... Remember what happened to Reeces' Pieces when it was in the move ET [et20.com] (see this story about the effect [adsubtract.com])? Yikes, everyone was eating those things! (And since the 20th anniversary of ET is going to yeild its re-release [corona.bc.ca] on 3/20/02, so we may have to endure it all over again!)

    • Re:Paid placement doesn't work... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iso ( 87585 ) <slash@warpze[ ]info ['ro.' in gap]> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @06:54PM (#2947944) Homepage
      It does help to make movies and games more realistic..

      Y'know, what's really frightening is that we feel we need to see ads for a scene to be "real." That just goes to show you how many ads we're subjected to each day.

      - j
      • No, when we see someone on screen using a brand we recognize, it's easier to relate the world of the movie to our world. Thus making it more "real."
      • Y'know, what's really frightening is that we feel we need to see ads for a scene to be "real."

        People expect ads. This bugs me. But you can have fun with it.

        There's someone who takes photographs of cities and removes all the ads in Photoshop, then prints them up as artworks. The effect is striking.

        There's a set of anti-commercialism games [globalarcade.org] at Global Arcade:

        • Mergeroids!
        • Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate your ship
        • Use the shift key to propel the ship
        • Use the control key to fire at the corporate asteroids
        • When companies touch, they merge. It takes more firepower to break them up!

        I have a financial web site [downside.com] that has a banner ad on it, just to make it look more "commercial". It just didn't look right without ads. It's a fake banner ad for Adbusters. Few people have ever noticed.

        I also have a fake site for last years's "AI" game [bwunn.com], full of fake ads. (About time to pull the plug on that one; the game sites themselves just went down, now that worldwide release of the movie is complete.) It looks more realistic that way.

  • THPS2 (not sure about 3) has product placement in just about every category possible - branded skateboards, ramps, ads on walls (some real, some spoof), and the PSX version even had a demo for a different game on-disc. Most of it's fine, unlike the Pizza Hut ad in the second Ninja Turtles game on NES, which just seemed out of place.
    • THPS3 had branded boards, et al, but also had clothing brands. I've never played THPS1 or 2, so I'm not sure if these were included or not.

  • Finally (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crandall ( 472654 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:39PM (#2947319) Homepage
    It's about time that ad companies start realizing that they are forcing so much at us, that it doesn't work anymore. (Redundant, I know).

    Still though, maybe they'll start finding better ways. First of all, the product really does have to appeal to the target audience. It has to make sense. I don't even notice ads anymore, they are just automatically blocked out of my vision.

    Occasionally, one that appeals to me in some way will surface. Like one I saw on slashdot a while back that asked what the smallest positive integer you could make with 9 9s and + - / * ( ) was. That grabbed my attention right there, but hey, I'm a programmer.

    On the other hand, most ads (read: X10) are totally ignored by me, and I don't even give it a second thought when my mouse automatically moves over and closes the window.
    • Advertising companies don't care whether or not what they do is effective: all they care about is whether their clients believe that it's effective.

      It's a con game.

    • Re:Finally (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Xerithane ( 13482 )
      The 9 9s problem was great! I don't think I've clicked through a slashdot ad previously in months (since before xmas, at least) because they just seem.. pointless.

      I spent a few minutes solving it out, and then continued on. It was a targetted *fun* ad. People need to come up with ads that are fun, and get the target doing something they like to do.

    • Re:Finally (Score:2, Insightful)

      by PyroMosh ( 287149 )
      A large part of the theory of advertising is "mindshare". One brand bombards you with it's name. When it comes time for you to purchace a product, you will think of brand x. Most likley purchasing it over a lesser known competitor. Of course this doesn't work for Pepsi if you hate Pepsi nad will only drink coke. But I see it already worked on you (at least the mindshare bit, perhaps not the purchasing bit) because you mention X10 cameras specificly. Sure you don't click through on them, but if you ignore them how do you know they're X10?

      I know that when *I* buy a stereo/potato chips/whatever, I'm more inclined to believe that Pepsi is a quality product than Sams Club brand cola. Or Pioneer vs Radiotronics brand. Or Crest toothpaste vs the generic supermarket brand. It makes me biased. I've *heard of* these guys before! This sounds better than that! Does that mean I don't comparison shop? No, of course I do. But I think that it's silly to think that advertising has no affect on you.

  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:40PM (#2947327) Homepage Journal
    and Pizza Hut. I still have the instruction book with the coupon on it. I challenge anyone to find a video game with advertisements in it older than that. I'm not sure if the ads worked then or not, but it was a wildly popular game.
  • I was a little peeved at the presence of blatant promotions for Soap shoes [soapshoes.com] in the game Sonic Adventure 2. Sonicteam kind of represented an independent spirit, despite the often shameless marketing of their mascot, and it kind of saddened me to see them tie the little blue guy to yet another way for preteens to injure themselves.

    It's fun looking for the ads-- real and fake-- in SA2, though. "Got Ring?"
    • That was one of the reasons I didn't like that as much as Sonic Adventure 1 - they just jumped on the grinding bandwagon and got product placement to go with it. It's nowhere near the level of gameplay you find in, say, Jet Set Radio.
  • That's the plain and simple fact of it. As a culture, we are so used to ignoring any form of advertising, that it just doesn't register anymore.

    Advertising is in a state of diminishing returns, and they need to go about it a different way.

    I thought that Hateful Chris 3d trailer was funny...

    "The earth is running critically low on ad space!"
    • That's the plain and simple fact of it. As a culture, we are so used to ignoring any form of advertising, that it just doesn't register anymore.

      You're kidding, right? The world is full of business ventures that succeed not on the basis of having a good product or fulfilling a need, but merely on the basis of strong marketing. If you doubt me, take a look at boy bands, girl bands, Britney Spears knock-offs, Mentos, and just about anything else in so-called "popular culture."
  • I've noticed on two XBox games, Project Gotham Racing and NFL Fever 2002 have fairly visible Taco Bell "ads". NFL Fever having the end of game Taco Bell highlight reel, and PGR having a few signs in NYC that say Taco Bell. I don't have any problem with it. Its a detail that if completely absent would draw some attention too... I mean think of the BCS for college football. I remember when each bowl didn't have a sponsor like the Tostito's Fiesta Bowl... Fed Ex... etc. Sponsorship is a part of our everyday lives... Does it mean I've gone to Taco Bell since their XBox media blitz started... Nope. Although a soft taco supreme sounds kinda good right now...

    BTW... This post sponsored by JohnChapin.NET [johnchapin.net]

  • Oh, that's why (Score:3, Funny)

    by BreakWindows ( 442819 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:43PM (#2947351) Homepage
    Ever since playing Max Payne, I've had the urge to buy a .50 caliber armalite automatic rifle and shoot the people who cross me...I guess this product placement stuff works.

    Oh well...time to go buy some doritos, because i AM bold and daring enough! [xbox.com]

    • Re:Oh, that's why (Score:4, Funny)

      by White Shadow ( 178120 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @05:09PM (#2947488) Homepage
      Ah yes, and after playing or watching Grand Theft Auto 3, I always have an urge to drive on the sidewalk, beat up police officers and drive around a firetruck.

      Oh wait, I had that urge before playing the game. Maybe that's why I played the game in the first place.
      • As I am learning to drive, I do this naturally. I haven't done the kerb crawling yet though, that comes in the advanced driving test.

        Still, I don't play games anymore. I am crap at them. Very crap. Better than my younger brother in law, but still crap. I enjoyed crazy taxi and got reasonable at that (on the skill tests). I now know that if I ever become a taxi driver that there are plenty of ways to make that money quicker.

        Product placement is good if placed well. You don't expect to see a Ford advert in some fantasy game, for example. However, product placement in a game like Bladerunner (or the film, Atari, ha ha!) can make things a lot more realistic. It is so sad when a film has "MegaSoft Corp." as the evil computer company, or whatever... ruins any grip on reality that might have existed.

  • I agree with the realism... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alexhmit01 ( 104757 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:45PM (#2947365)
    Did any of you play games on 15 years ago? Going to Pizza Hut instead of "the pizza place" does help you relate to the game more. It makes it easier to relate to the character.

    My partner found the article at work the other day, it was interesting. Before he even mentioned the part about promotions my first thought was promotional deals.

    Sure Dole isn't paying for the US rights, but why should Sega spend money removing it. The Dole stuff was amusing and SO over-the-top it didn't even seem like a game, it was funny. I couldn't stop laughing about the Dole stuff everywhere.

    I don't buy bananas on brand, so it's irrelevant, but if they were launching a luxury version, it makes sense to do promotional deals.

    Alex
    • Going to Pizza Hut instead of "the pizza place" does help you relate to the game more. It makes it easier to relate to the character.

      Sure it does. Players have an easier time relating to characters when they don't have to put any imagination into it, but I don't think that makes it better. Pizza Hut is a pop-culture icon, and doesn't need to be imagined by the player, or developed by the developer. How boring. I think any character developer who thinks that sending a character to Pizza Hut is a good idea is damned lazy. It would be relatively easy to send the same character to "PizzaWorld", a made-up pizza emporium with a snazzy logo and "A free GookGook doll with every large pizza!" The point being made about the character's ideals is the same... he likes to succumb to pop-culture. But, by creating an imaginary pop-culture restaurant, the player gets to imagine the rest. And in case you hadn't heard, imagination is FUN. :)
  • I think there are two different kinds of advertisement that can be put into video games. One kind is ads that make sense within the world of the game. One example would be if a racing game had paid advertisements on the cars that made them look like real race cars. Another would be selling space for court-side ads in a basketball game. I think this sort of advertisement is perfectly accetptable because it adds to the verisimilitude of the game.


    The second kind of advertisements is product placement that does not fit stylistically into the game. An example would be if the cut scenes in Final Fantasy showed the characters wearing Fubu clothing and swilling Cherry Coke. This sort of product placement makes one feel that advertising is being 'crammed down one\'s throat', and is thus not acceptable to many gamers. As long as companies can differentiate between the two types-- and avoid the latter-- everything will be okay.


    I also have a related question: What's the deal with the car brands in Gran Turismo? Do the car companies pay to have their products "featured" in the game, does the game company pay for the rights to use real cars, or does no money change hands?


    Thanks for your time.

  • I was thinking about this just the other day when I got the DVD of 2001 for my birthday.

    Looking online I found this interesting essay [elstree.co.uk] on the movie in which it discusses briefly product placement at a time when it wasn't as rampant a phenomenon. Also, this article from Reuters, Product Placement Blatant Not Subtle in Films [flipside.org] was interesting; it covers both movies and video games, and how the entertainment industry moved from simple product placement to strategic marketing. Quoting from this:

    ....Entertainment industry experts say the days of searching the screen for sotto voce references to a brand name are over.

    The new world in entertainment marketing leaps out of the screen into the world the audience inhabits, traveling under intriguing titles such as viral marketing, street marketing and wild posting.
    • I'm always amused when the Doritos are eaten out of a wrinkle-free bag with the complete logo visible at all times... or the Pepsi can held "just so" that the entire logo can be seen... On the flip side, it annoys me that MTV/VH1 blurs out logos on clothing (always in rap videos no less).

      I'd prefer product placement be very natural and realistic. It is boring seeing generic products in movies.

      My biggest pet peeve is how EVERY phone number has to begin with "555"- what kind of idiots do they think we are? Or rather "what kind of idiots watch movies."

  • Product placement (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:53PM (#2947398) Homepage
    Product placement is usually accepted where it doesn't interfere with the product in which it is placed. James Bond driving a BMW is fine, and might even boost BMW's image. The camera focusing on the BMW logo on James' car is not.

    So, for example, if there were going to be cans of soda int he game anyway, like in Deus Ex, there shouldn't be any objection to putting a real-world brand name on them.
    • Yeah, you bring up the opposite of product placement: the jarring moment (similar to all movie and TV phone numbers starting with 555) when a product is so obviously fake that it pulls you completely out of the 'reality' of the moment.
    • James Bond driving a BMW is fine, and might even boost BMW's image. The camera focusing on the BMW logo on James' car is not.

      You must love early Jacky Chan movies then...all those moments where a Mitsubishi logo fills the screen and someone offhandedly mentions how fantastic their car is.
    • . James Bond driving a BMW is fine
      no, no its not. For so many reasons the mind boggles! ;)
      however I do agree with your point.

  • Product Placement can be a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @04:56PM (#2947408) Homepage Journal
    Besides funding, product placement can add realism to a game. We're immersed in product placement in real life, so it seems strange to not see it in a supposedly reality-based game.

    Of course, in real life we see competing brands advertised all the time, but that wouldn't happen in a game. You won't see both Coke and Pepsi billboards in one game any time soon. Furthermore, games usually have just a handful of sponsors - sometimes even just one. The Illusion is somewhat broken if all you see in a game are Nike ads and nothing else.

    But the most common offense I see is when they put in ads for their own company or development team. Sure it was funny maybe a few years ago, but I don't want to see giant ads for Interplay, Inc. or "Team Blue" in every game I play. (Note to developers: this also goes for pictures of your family and obscure in-jokes that only Bob will find hilarous.)

  • yum (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Avatar 888 ( 256911 )
    i have to say i've been really rather impressed recently by the adverts in gta3... they really do help to build up that living city feel. and the radio ads blatently rock.

    though i think the best use of product placement in a game has to go to wipeout 2097 and its use of red bull... that just fitted so perfectly to me... am i right in saying that was done with no cash changing hands too?


    avatar

    -----------
    like a slice of toast gaffer taped [mesmerized.org] to a cat

  • PetsOverNight.com (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HiredMan ( 5546 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @05:04PM (#2947445) Journal
    The radio stations in Grand Theft Auto III really help make the game and the ads really help make the radio stations work. They add to the "texture" of the game and give the game makers the ability to make subtle (and funny) commentaries on society.

    The wierd thing is that MOST of the ads are fake... but some of the personal promotions stuff (Game Radio) are real or are they... the bleed over between the fake ads and reality adds another dimension to the game.

    This article also shows that if you ignore ads THEY WILL STOP. If you don't like ads complain and specifically do not buy those products.

    =tkk
    • Speaking of product placement and Grand Theft Auto III, it is very noticeable to me that none of the cars in the game are "real". E.g. the Mafia Sentinel, it's really a Mercedes, right? But they don't call it a Mercedes. There are tons of cars in the game that look pretty much like some real car, but they all have different names. I guess they didn't want to pay to license actual vehicle names? It just feels odd, considering how many driving games have "real" cars in them.

      By the way, I agree about the radio stations in GTA3. They are a blast, really great parodies. "Next up, 9 minutes of non-stop music. Right after these 10 minutes of commercials." The one about Pogo the Monkey is a hoot too.
  • I sit in front of my webcam drinking Dr. Pepper all day. Thousands of visitors see me drinking Dr. Pepper every month. But do you think Dr. Pepper has ever even ONCE offered to sponsor me??? NO! Of course not.

    -Restil

  • It should be cheaper (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lyberth ( 319170 )
    If Red Bull pays a lot of money to have theur adds in WipeOut and other games i would expect that the developers could reduce the price. But no they ofcourse increse the price and calls the adds a "feature" that increases the gameplay
  • I liked the subtle realism of having a brand name laptop recognizable in the game. Walking in to one of the rooms and seeing a ThinkPad X series laptop was pretty cool.

  • Where would I have gotten my Giraffe? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Without product placement I never would have known about petsovernight.com.

    Rush Rush to me Yao!
  • The only serious problem with this is when the marketing execs find that people start shooting up the ads that they don't like, they'll try and force the game companies to make thier ads invulnerable to enemy fire. That's cheating!
  • But for some reason, all of a sudden, after reading this article, I wanna go home and fire up my Atari 2600 emulator.
  • "so long as they fit the context of the game"

    The product should fit the context of the game - and not the advertisement... I can just imagine it, walking through some Half-Life clone, collecting a red key, pulling a lever on the wall of a darkened corridor, wading through demon-hordes to get the blue key, and finally opening that last door to reveal a message saying:

    "Trouble shifting those nasty bloodstains on your Quake armour? Tired of cleaning the guts off your marine uniform? Then try NEW WonderClene*TM spray on your clothes! Just two squirts and you're back in the action! *contains bleach"

    That would be the wrong kinda realism for me.

  • This is not new stuff. Product placements in computer software go back to the late 1980s, when Sega was putting Marlboro banners in its arcade auto racing games. If the developers place the ads wisely, I don't mind, and I'm sure nobody does. But if they go over the edge, a lot of people will get upset and won't buy their products anymore. So I think it's the developers' job to keep the balance and to give us quality entertainment :)
    btw... here are some articles regarding the subject that you should read:

    Product placement in games [usatoday.com]

    Placing Product Before Art [wired.com]

  • Nazi product placement was over the top (Score:3, Funny)

    by wackybrit ( 321117 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @05:50PM (#2947672) Homepage Journal
    I really love Return To Castle Wolfenstein, but I am a little sickened that the company chose to accept a new product placement deal from the NAZI party.. apparently it follows on from the original Wolfenstein game, but I think it's a little tasteless.
  • The arcade game called tapper and it's child version had product placement. Tapper had budwiser signs all over while the kiddie version had Mountain Dew signs all over..

    This is nothing new, and I am glad to see that it's dying! The less I am bombarded with advertisments the better...Although, they just might wait for everyone to get used to not seeing them and then start the evil cycle over again....

    Advvertising is a really evil game... too bad it pay's my mortgage :_)
    • I was wrong, it was released in 1984. the C-64 version was out at the end of 1985 first Q 1986.

      I knew I should have looked at the machine before posting... my bad.
  • I used to work for a compay called Cricinfo, and in the database of registered users, there was a field about how those users came to the site. There were a significant number that specified they'd heard about the site from playing one of the cricket games on computer.. It seemed to work very nicely for them. :)
  • SQ4..I think. Can't remember. Anywho, gets my vote for best real PP, and best fake. The real one was Sprint; all of the transporters in the game used Sprint as a carrier. It was funny. The fake one was for Soylent Clear. Nice jingle. Look for it on google.
  • I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game.

    I thought it was cool that, in Metal Gear Solid 2, you could pick up copies of FHM magazine and leave them in strategic places to distract guards.

    What I wish they had done is to leave some White Castle hamburgers laying around. If Snake eats them, he loses some health and gets bad gas, which naturally alerts the guards to his presence.

    Oh well, there's always MGS3 to look forward to.

    Steve

  • Realistic product placement (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Toxxy ( 231886 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @06:43PM (#2947907)
    I find that product placement in games is terrific. To play off of another post I saw here, a gentleman was commenting on how he didn't enjoy seeing advertisements for the company that produces the game, or family photos, etc. Ten times out of ten, I'll want to see "Pepsi" on the side of a can in the game than I would "SUPERCOLA." Intelligent product placement makes the game much more believable, and doesn't launch me out of the otherwise serious nature of the game with "Supercola? wtf?"

    Take Max Payne for instance; a game that I find fairly realistic. If the painkillers were all "Advil" or "Tylenol" or something, I would find that tasteful and I would prefer it over "Painkillers."

    I'd say that everybody wins in that situation. The advertising company gets some cheap (and probably well-noticed) advertising, the software company gets some extra cash in their pockets, and the end player gets some added realism.

    I think tastefulness is the key issue here, and I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that "SUPERCOLA" takes me way out of the illusion that the game publishers are trying to embed me in.
    • I fnd it interesting thta we can play a game where people fly, or travel to other planets and blow up demons. but putting "supercola" on a can of soda "just isn't real enough"
      I agree with you, but I just find that a funny quirk of human nature.
      I see it in gaming all the time, You gat a guy who can run 800 MPH, and that OK, but give him the ability to run up walls and suddenly "Hey thats not realistic!"

  • A logo in a vidgame is 'cramming down the throat'? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gotan ( 60103 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @09:15PM (#2948386) Homepage
    Then how is advertising over two pages in a magazine (and filling it up with crappy brochures), posters or even neon light installations the size of buildings, TV-advertising, telemarketing, and, the latest fashion, pop up ads, not? If it's worth advertising on some poster on a wall, why isn't it worth advertising on a Wall in virtual reality? You know the audience that will come by, nobody will mess up the poster, or alter it in creative ways, and you even get to choose the place and surroundings of that advert.

    If it were no good idea to advertise there, where you at least know the audience, then maybe the whole concept of advertising should be reconsidered. I think brand recognition is greatly underestimated, if those corporations are concerned about how, and in which context their products are displayed. Did anyone ever notice how many of those rich evil movie drug-dealer types cruise around in those big black Mercedes or BMW? And that gave those cars a bad rap? Not that i'd notice.
    --

  • Its historically pretty messed up. You'd think they'd be paying us to place their logos -- but in practice we (game developers) have had to pay for the right to use the logo. Thats slowly changing, though. Its harder in things like stadiums. Usually the agreement states something along the lines of we can't go placing random things. We have to approach the real owner of each logo -- and if they disagree, we can't place a competitors logo in its place.

  • Most game players are more interested in the game
    itself, rather than the advertisements. However, it
    is possible to put ads in games without making them
    annoying.


    The first thing that should never, ever, ever be done
    is to make the whole game an ad for something.
    In the old days of the NES, there were TONS of crappy
    games produced that were basically ads. There was
    a game featuring the "Noid" mascot for Dominoes Pizza. There was also a game centered around McDonalds, Seven Up, and plenty of other stuff,
    IIRC.


    I guess the next worse thing is to make a game that
    is crappy, but with a popular theme, in order to
    stick ads in it. Examples of this are the games
    that starred Shaq and Jordan which were not basketball games. Not surprisingly, Pepsi ads were crammed into Shaq-Fu.

  • "I actually like ads in games, whether they're spoofs or real, so long as they fit the context of the game."

    GranTurismo is about the Grand Touring racing industry. The advertising is how they keep the sport alive. The game is filled with advertisements, even the cars are modeled after real cars and have the stickers from the real advertisers. I've always thought it gave the game a hightened sense of reality and wondered if the original spooncer had something to do with game funding. Apparently not (after a little research) but it still makes you wonder how much money they (Sony) could make if they had chosen to charge some nominal fee for advertisements in the game.

    ~LoudMusic

  • Playstation Wipeout (Score:2, Informative)

    by marko123 ( 131635 )
    Being an Australian, I played Wipeout way before Red Bull was promoted here. So it looked like a made up sponsor for the game, and I wondered why the game promoted a pretend product so heavily. I thought that maybe it was some kind of in joke. Of course, it made sense once I knew what Red Bull was :)

  • It ads to the realism and pays the bills... (Score:3, Informative)

    by PhotoGuy ( 189467 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @10:10PM (#2948595) Homepage
    Real advertisements in games that are attempting to simulate reality, seems like a boon to me. And if helps pay the bills for the game maker, more power to them.

    And dynamically changing ads would actually ad more interest to the game. I think it'd be cool to be distracted momentarily by a new interesting ad, and become someone else's frag due to the distraction. Hah!

    I find it hard to see the down side. In movies, I think there's a far greater likelihood of compromising the creator's artistic integrity (when each shot starts with a well-framed shot of a Pepsi can :-); in games, where the viewpoints are less well defined, and user controlled, I think it's a lot harder to compromise the game's value.

    Whenver the ads rolover, I'd be just like Homer when all the new billboard's come out. Might even end up joining a clown college because of it. "Dooo doo doo do do do do doooo doo dooo dooo"... :-)

    -me

  • It can work (Score:2, Interesting)

    by IowaBoy ( 14068 )
    Well I for one am an example of successful product placement in a videogame. Back when WipeoutXL for the original PlayStation first came out, on several of the tracks (and I think on the intro movies) I kept seeing "billboard" ads for something called Red Bull. (By then, of course, Red Bull was well established in Europe, and WipeoutXL was produced by Sony's U.K. unit, Psygnosis). So when I saw it in the store, I bought one just to see what it was. And I still drink the occassional bottle. So it can work.
  • The Isher reference is to A.E.VanVogt's classic science fiction story The Weapon Shops of Isher [aol.com]. You can figure out where the BFG-9000 came from :-)


    Actually, there is a company Isher Artifacts [isherartifacts.com] which makes some really *fine* looking energy weapons.

  • It would be nice if more people did "fake" product placements to crowd out real brands, like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith making up Red Apple and Nails brand cigarettes, respectively. Or most of the brands in the Simpsons universe.
  • I've said for years that ads have a place in games. Games are very costly (with good reason, costly to develop, you know). I think that publishing companies and dev houses are loosing some of their target audience to piracy, due to the prohibitive costs of the latest and greatest games. Boys aged 12 to 25 usually have limited funds to spend on games. When those kids get older, whether they have the cash or not, they are so used to not paying and so used to ignoring ip laws that they might continue a life of crime (in casual piracy).

    Now, ads have their time and place in video games. It wouldn't be right to see an "Enjoy Coke" sign just before you confront the Butcher in Diablo. In games like Deus Ex, Max Payne, and Grand Theft Auto, however, it's natural to include billboards and other types of adverts. Such endeavors add (no pun intended) atmosphere to games that already strive to become more realistic and involving.

    We've seen ads in some games, but they are usually for other games by the same companies. (Sega seemed to be pretty keen on this idea a few years ago with their racing games, but I believe that it has kind of fizzled out.) Sports games are very good candidates for advertising. What two things go together better than professional sports and blatent commercialism? EA, for example, strives to make the play its sports titles more like sports produced for television. If I could get a free (or cheap) legal copy of NHL 2002, I could put up with commercials between periods. This is a game that has tv camera angles, color (annoying) commentary, realistic breaks between faceoffs, and puck highlighting extremely similar to network television. Why not go to the next step? Some of those ads could have spokespeople of the digital versions of actual Hockey players. Games are a niche market, you have a young male demographic to target. This makes advertising easy. Knowing the gender and age of 97 percent of your audience can enable more specialized ads and ultimately reach a larger percentage of them. (Ads starring Britney Spears could reach millions.)

    There are a few problems with this. People will get very tired of the ads that come with the game by default. Users could be prompted every so often to download the new ads from the web site. Still, there's a problem. Advertisers who may have pulled their advertising for one reason or another will still be running on unpatched software, and new advertisers won't get the ads displayed which they have payed for. I suppose that this could be measured in downloads, and the advertisers could pay when a month is over and the usage statistics were in. Downloads could also determine payment for the original advertisers, which would be good for them, but not so good for the gaming company. When advertisers pay for television ads, they can never be sure how many viewers there will be, so they could spend a million dollars on an ad that will never be seen. Developers need to be paid, though, and the odds are that there won't be 2 million downloads (or orders or whatever) in the first 3 weeks. Another problem would be that this would keep the developers pretty darn busy in the months following a game release. This is time that could be better spent on new titles. Fortunately, if this proved popular, advertising agencies and/or the companies they represent would begin to hire professionals that could produce the commercials and sent to the game's publishing company to be inserted where they are needed. These ads would be much less costly than tv ads to write and develop (unless they used conventional tools, such as cameras and video). This brings up another problem. With the thousands of 3d engines out there, these directors and developers would have to develop in the same engine that the game is in (again, unless it's video). Moreover, they would have to learn new level designers and programs for mostly every game out there. Publishers, however, could provide them with the tools necessary (the ones the dev houses are using) early in production so that the ads could be ready by the time the game goes gold. As this becomes more common, a better plan might be to write 3d engines that support models and animations from animation programs, such as Lightwave, Maya, 3dsmax, SoftImage, or even Blender (yay for free!). Most engines support these one way or another, since there has to be a way to model for the game in the first place. Also, of course, you could do animations and put them as video in the game, but that's a wussy solution. (I think that should've been more than one paragraph.)

    Gamers decidedly opposed to ads in games could still pay their 50 bucks for non-ad versions. This would not be hard for commercials or billboard ads. For commercials, just remove them. Just take them out altogether (or if you want to be weird, give the users an option to disable them and to skip ones they don't want to see with the spacebar). For billboard and neon signs and the like, just replace the ad textures within the game packages with "Eat at Joe's" and other fake ads. (Note: In the cheap or free versions of these games, you would have to put some sort of protection on these files to prevent people from creating mods that disable the ads. You'd have to tell the engine to always take these ads over any others. You also might have to put some sort of protection on the actual packages to prevent people from getting in there and actually changing those files. You might put those in a separate, protected package, but that could easily be deleted or replaced. You could put them within the actual executables or something, but then they would be really hard to replace if you wanted or needed to. The best solution I can come up with right now (5AM) is to put them in their own protected package within the main game package. Passwords might work, but some sort of encryption would be much better. Neither of those would be foolproof, but they would keep out the casual cracker and people like me who would try for 2 1/2 minutes and then forget what they were doing. You might think of something better that would keep out almost everyone, but I am certainly not the person to ask about anti-piracy measures, unless of course you want to bypass them.)


    In regards to ads and product placement not working, fuck that. They work as well as any ad does. When commercials come on tv, I don't pay attention. Sometimes I leave the room, sometimes I talk to people, sometimes I just get on /., and sometimes I turn off the tv altogether. I don't know anyone who actually watches ads on any other day except the Super Bowl. My mother only watches recorded tv, so she never sees commercials. I see a lot more ads on the web than on tv, which brings me to another point entirely.

    I see so many ad-supported sites going down because of revenues being down. I think that advertisers have it all wrong. Web ads are measured in clicks. That's all wrong, Cat. On the rare occasions that I do see tv ads, even if I like the ad, I don't immediately want to turn to the all-Charmin Network (or whatever product is being sold). The same goes for web sites. Just because I see an ad, doesn't mean that I immediately want to cease my current task and go to the web site for the product they are selling. Maybe if there was a checkmark beside every ad that said, "I see this ad and acknowledge it's existence." That way, bastard companies would know that I saw their ad, but it wasn't interesting enough to click on.

    kill $(pidof -x Rant); *


    At any rate, I see ads in video games because that's where I am most of the time. Nobody pays attention to ads anymore, no matter where they are. I don't even see pop-up ads anymore. Ctrl-Q (or Alt-F4) helps me with that. Advertising is a part of capitalism. I hope to see it progress into the video game market. Advertisers just need to learn how to use video games to their advantage. It'll keep costs down, but not punish the developers who (usually)deserve every penny of the money they do get.

    P.S. I want to say that keeping the costs down of some genres and not others seems a bit wrong. It would be a shame for the FPS players to pay a lot less money for games than MMORPG fans do. This is the major hole in my arguement. I don't know how to knock it down, other than saying, "Well, they'll just have to figure out how to advertise or lower their prices." Please post or send me any suggestions about how to make this go away. You can also do it if you disagree with everything I say. Please do.


    *My linux install totally fucked itself the other day, so I can't check my syntax. Don't yell if it's wrong.
    procinfo | grep Rant | awk '(print $13)' | kill
    pidof Rant | kill
    I thought about using those, too, but they may not be right, either.

Slashdot Top Deals

2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League

Close