Adverts in games (was RE: [MUD-Dev] Habbo Hotel...)

[Frank Crowell]

"Sellers, Michael" wrote:

> Advertising in games may happen one day, but not for a long time I
> think.  Not until games have audiences at least an order of
> magnitude or two larger than they are now, at the very least.

Unfortunately there are some people that are fairly serious about
this.  At Streaming Media West I went to a "proven business model"
session which of course was games.  Not only did I get presented with
the view that people wanted their games streamed (don't know why that
would be so exciting), to "ad placement inside a game".  I actually
watched a demo (I hope it was only a demo) where I saw a car ad
inserted in two places -- once during the peak of the game and then at
the end.  I won't even mention the famous name company that was very
seriously talking about this (Macromedia, ack did I say that out
loud?).

Here's what happened.  Three years after some virtual worlds people
had already declared dead the notion of advertising revenue by
"eyeball attraction" a lot of the web-based companies found out --
surprise, surprise -- that eyeball attraction could not generate those
advertising dollars.

So all those annoying popup pushes, ad servers, and ad insertions
weren't making anyone any money.  Then the next logical thing was of
course to take all those annoying ads and put them where the people
really were which is inside games -- at least in those streamed,
web-based games.  You know the kind of games that thousands of us
enjoy everyday.  Um, I can't name one, but I am sure there must be
some.

A few months ago someone sent me a fairly interesting mockup screen
shot for Everquest where the campers had mods on their armor to
reflect corporate sponsorship.  I liked that one.

frank

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