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XBox (Games)

Adverts Coming To Xbox 360 Achievements 55

Posted by Zonk from the this-revulsion-is-brought-to-you-by-unabashed-greed dept.
Joystiq reports that the charming sports custom of having game elements sponsored by a corporation or product will now be coming to Xbox Live Achievements. "A quick skim down the list of achievements for EA's upcoming NCAA 08 Football shows sponsored goals such as the 'Old Spice Red Zone Perfection' and 'Pontiac 4th Quarter Comeback.' Each achievement is accompanied by a logo for the company in the achievement's image. We can only imagine the possibilities for future Xbox 360 games. Halo Around the Collar, sponsored by Tide? Mass Effect sponsored by the Axe Effect? Grand Theft Auto IV's Bounty Beatdown (great for sopping up blood spills)? The possibilities are endless." One would hope this will stay restricted to sports games.
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Adverts Coming To Xbox 360 Achievements More

Adverts Coming To Xbox 360 Achievements

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  • The -real- Halo achievement... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bieeanda ( 961632 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @06:24PM (#19736717)
    The Tetley. Better teabag, better tea.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by provigilman ( 1044114 )
      Achievement: 3M Post-It Award

      Criteria: Stick 50 enemies in multiplayer ranked matches

      Icon: Post-It note with a picture of a Plasma Grenade

      • Achievement: 3M Post-It Award


        Criteria: Stick 50 enemies in multiplayer ranked matches


        Icon: Post-It note with a picture of a Plasma Grenade

        That would actually make a great 10-second loading screen game, even better than Wave Race's little bubble that you can play with in the water.
  • I wonder how much of this Microsoft has any control over. I mean, it's the developer that decides what's worthy of an achievement and how many points it's worth, right? I could see them stepping in if there was a GTA4 achievement for beating 1000 hookers to death or something along those lines but just tasteless advertising I wonder how much say they have in the matter.

    Man I hate EA though.
  • Personally, I don't care much about achievements to begin with. Now having them sponsored... complete and utter nonsense. I already cringe when I see them on ESPN, I'll cringe even more when I'll see them in a game I PAID MONEY FOR! Maybe in a free game I'll accept it, but this is just nonsense.
    • You know, it only just occurred to me that when you watch TV you get adds, you paid for the TV. You go to the football stadium to watch the game, you'll still see ads, even though you paid to get in. Although i'm not condoning ads in games (i hate them myself), it seems that just because you paid for something, doesn't mean you don't get ads.
      • Yes, but few are as distracting as "Jack in the box come back of the year", or something like that. I understand ads, I know how to skip the annoying ones, but this stuff just confuses the hell out of me. Especially if the connection is not there... like in a lot of the games now.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )
      I don't care as long as the advertising is in sports games. After all, if you're driving around a car plastered with Home Depot and Exxon Mobile ads in NASCAR'08, I don't think you're going to give a damn about sponsored achievements.

      In fact, I don't think anyone should care in any sports game. Even without "advertisements" in sports games, the entire game is a giant advertisement. The NFL and the NBA are corporations. They are businesses. They are not public utilities. If you're dumb enough to cheer for th
    • The only good side I can see to these achievements is to judge the age of a particular gamertag. In theory, it stops people from a lot of fucking around in online games.

      Take Forza 2 for instance. Your main GT is the one you use to play through the game, and unlock all the goodies/cars/money. If you want to fuck around and wind people up online, you have to switch to another GT. To play with your car of choice, you either have to level up the new GT, or send your car over from your other account. For a

  • Good luck with that (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tulmad ( 25666 )
    One would hope this will stay restricted to sports games.

    There's money to be made in in-game advertisement, so you'll be seeing this a lot more.

    • Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Doctor_Jest ( 688315 ) * on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @07:46PM (#19737571)
      Remember back in the days of VHS movies (that came out at $100 a pop or more)... and the first "subsidized" movie from Hollyweird to come out at a reasonable price was Top Gun because it had a Pepsi advert at the beginning?

      Or the early days of cable television... "advert free!" because you "paid" to subscribe to it... funny... never panned out there either.

      Wonder where the price drop for this advertising comes in? Guess it's not getting as far as us this time. We're paying to be advertised to. Amazing how far we've fallen.

  • This is new? (Score:5, Informative)

    by gotroot801 ( 7857 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @06:35PM (#19736857) Homepage Journal
    EA Sports has already done this with Fight Night Round 3: Burger King, Dodge, Everlast, Under Armour, three different ESPN achievements, and the ubiquitous EA Sports achievement.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Thing 1 ( 178996 )

      You know, I don't follow sports much, but decided to watch a game the other day. Even the announcers are into product placement every, like, 2 minutes or so. It's shameless. So I have no doubt that it'll creep into sports games, and from there to many others.

      Similarly, I just re-played Crackdown (Xbox 360) again for the first time in several months, and there are now "starting spots" in the game which try to sell you add-on packs for the game. Wish those could be disabled, I already bought the game...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reapy ( 688651 )
      That was the main reason I didn't buy fight night 3. I enjoyed the other two immensely and felt they were THE best boxing games I had played (next to 4d sports boxing ;) ), but the bk and dodge ads were ridiculous.

      "This knockout was brought to you by burger king". No, it was brought to you by my fist in the other guy's face.

      I could tolerate the underarmor ads, since they are in fact a company about boxing, and therefore add realism. I mean for christ's sakes they had a MINI van as prizes your boxer would ge

  • A quick skim down the list of achievements for EA's upcoming NCAA 08 Football shows sponsored goals such as the 'Old Spice Red Zone Perfection'

    I hope this means that Bruce Campbell is coming to the Xbox.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af1OxkFOK18 [youtube.com]
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6bZSM48vU [youtube.com]

  • Will we see any of the money from this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @06:44PM (#19736945)
    I've purchased more games over the years that I care to count and I've enjoyed most of the ones that I've purchased. For the most part, cost was never a big factor in purchasing games, but with the increased costs of games this most recent generation, I've been more leerly towards purchasing titles without doing a good amount of research into them first.

    Similarly, I used to have a subscription to Xbox Live but haven't played on it in a very long while. It was a fairly good service in and of itself (most of the shortcomings deal more with the people who use it than with the technical details of the service) and not really all that bad of a deal for the roughly four dollars a month that it cost. At the time it was completely free of adertisements or anything else designed to get me to fork out more cash.

    However, now that there seems to be a store selling virtuals goods and other things as well as increased advertisement both online and in the games themselves, will part of the money earned by the companies who produce these games and host the online system be used to offset some of the cost that I pay for these games and services? However, if I'm cruising around in my "Built Ford Tough" Warthog in Halo 3 and then looking over the stats in the post-match Pepsi rundown, I'd like to pay a little less than the full price. If you're going to subject me to crap advertising that I'd like to escape and expect to charge me just so that I can be subjected to it, I'm not going to spend $60 on your game or $50 on your online service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Thing 1 ( 178996 )

      However, if I'm cruising around in my "Built Ford Tough" Warthog in Halo 3 and then looking over the stats in the post-match Pepsi rundown, I'd like to pay a little less than the full price. If you're going to subject me to crap advertising that I'd like to escape and expect to charge me just so that I can be subjected to it, I'm not going to spend $60 on your game or $50 on your online service.

      You said it.

      The McDonald's ads look surprisingly distasteful (pun...), especially after having watched "Super

    • If movie theaters are any indication, then prices won't go down, but will continue to rise. I managed theaters for a while, and despite our astronomical concession prices, we weren't rolling in dough. Pre-trailer ads were another revenue stream, for essentially no effort. A few people stopped coming because of the ads, but the extra money more than made up for it. Just like a few people might not buy a game with ads, but most won't care.

  • Correction. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jZnat ( 793348 ) * on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @06:47PM (#19736975) Homepage Journal

    One would hope this will stay restricted to EA sports games.
    There, fixed it for you. EA Sports is quickly gaining the reputation of being the low-risk, high-profit, incremental-updates-that-still-cost-$60, overly-large publisher that really shouldn't even exist anymore if people gave enough of a damn to stop buying their shit.

    The fact that they are injecting even more advertising in their games comes as no surprise. Hell, if Microsoft Games started making their published games support ads, that would be surprising. Even more so if Nintendo started doing it. EA is just like that...
    • I'm curious as to what EA Sports games you play. Most of the series I am familiar with, EA adds as much as it can to convince people to actually buy the yearly updates. It's a popular meme on here that all they do is update the rosters, but most new versions I've seen are a significant improvement over their predecessors, both in gameplay and front office options. This is especially true as they move development over to the newer platforms. NHL 2007, for example, completely revamped the control scheme, and

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jZnat ( 793348 ) *
        I'm speaking of Madden. I play the new versions (usually once every other new version), and they don't seem to improve a lot anymore. Hell, the next-gen graphics they promised still look the same as on Xbox. I like EA Big or whatever it is that makes games like SSX, but they're a lot more "out there" than your typical official game with licensed shit out the wazoo.
  • Advertisements on XBOX achievements is not really that annoying to the player, is it? If anything, the real annoyance should be that the sizable amount of extra money that EA earns from these ads is not being passed on to the player in the form of a slightly cheaper game.

  • If they were smart about this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by grapeape ( 137008 ) <mpope7 AT kc DOT rr DOT com> on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @08:12PM (#19737879) Homepage
    If they really wanted to make an impact and get advertising dollars, why not have sponsors for the nickle and dime downloads they offer in marketplace, things like backgounds, skins, etc. Cars for Forza sponsored by the car companies, new outfits for Hitman maybe as absurd as a burger king uniform. Everyone likes free and sponsored content would allow more people would see it and pay attention to it than an icon next to someone elses achievements. Seriously who over the age of 18 really gives a flip about achievements anyway? Do people actually take the time to browse other peoples achievements? Assuming 10% (thats probably very generous) do how many actually take time to read them? So who exactly are they advertising to?

    • They are advertising to the person playing the game.

      It may sounds silly, but unlocking an achievement feels good. When I finally kill my 2,000th bad guy in Halo3, I'm going to be excited. Now if I see an Axe body spray logo at the same time I may associate that logo with the excited feeling. Next time I'm in a store and I see the same logo, that associated feeling comes back and I'm more likely to buy.

  • I only watch 2-3 televised sport games a year plus 1-2 college games live. They are full of advertising. Ads on the side line, ads on the players, ads on the ball, ads on the court, ads on the scoreboard, ads on the tickets, drink cups, mens room, etc. If you are a big enough fan to buy a $3000 Superbowl ticket, you are not going to say "no thanks" because it advertises Budweiser.

    Ad dollars run sports. Not having ads in the achievements would look out of place.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ivan256 ( 17499 )
      They don't charge me $60 to turn on the game on broadcast TV.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by trdrstv ( 986999 )

        They don't charge me $60 to turn on the game on broadcast TV.

        Yes, but millions of people pay for the privilege of watching Cable or Satellite TV AND have to watch commercials.

        So don't expect a major outrage to this business model. Some how, for some reason... it worked for TV...

      • But they do charge you to watch it on cable, more if you want to watch it in HD-TV.

        In many cases, the amount of advertising doesn't go down if you pay more. In fact, it sometimes goes up. What changes is the type of things they advertise to you (you are more likely to see ads for higher end cars if you buy a Super Bowl ticket).

  • I think they got in to enough trouble for GTA3:San Andreas' Starbucks mod.
  • "I need a pickup" takes on a whole new meaning.
  • With the price of development for video games rising through the roof, I say go ahead and use advertising revenues to fund it. Stick logos beside achievements. Put billboards along the racetrack. Let companies sponsor games. Give me snazzier games, and keep the cost the same for me! Sounds like a good deal.

    I'm less inclined to allow them to advertise to me in a disruptive fashion. Don't interrupt the game, or make me sit through an ad. I've resigned myself to dealing with ads on TV, but in a game it migh
  • You unlock an achievement, and as a reward, you're allowed to be a freaking billboard. Wow. I will not play those games.
  • The visual pollution of advertising is continuing to spread to every corner our eyes could possibly rest at. Now, even the place I go to relax and ESCAPE is going to start bombarding me with ads. In game "product placement", blatant ads in the console, and more. Just great. Movies have been getting worse and worse for this- in the movie and big ones before the film.

    Many products I buy come plastered with stickers for extra services or features. I pick them off when I can. Then once you step out side it's ev
  • My 360 died yesterday. It was a launch unit from 2005. I am not getting another 360 by paying 140$ to get it exchanged by microsoft. I think my 360 saw this sponsored achievemnt shit coming and died to prevent me being corrupted by evil :)

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