Would you mind Commercials in loading screens?

[ShootMyMonkey]

Admoney would just go straight down the company's pocket to increase profits.

Maybe it's because I'm a game developer that I don't know this, but... what's a profit? I've never heard of them. If anything, I'd say that this would go into the company's pocket to reduce losses. And I also doubt a lot of advertisers are just going to say, "here, take our money" -- many will probably want residuals.

None of those games have reduced their price because of it, and I highly doubt the cost will be reduced in the future either. There is no sign of price reduction in mind from ads.

Of course not. It's not done to make development cheaper. It's done to have more sources of cash to pay for it.

 

[pc999]

Well... half the game price (or more), then may be we'll talk.

I think the same, if a) there is a significant reduncion in the cost of the game b) the loading/ad isnt bigger than it need to be (if there is a need to have loadings) and c) the ad is apropriated to the game (ie no tennage girl stuff inside a Resident Evil game). In those cases I would agree.

 

[patsu]

Maybe it's because I'm a game developer that I don't know this, but... what's a profit? I've never heard of them. If anything, I'd say that this would go into the company's pocket to reduce losses. And I also doubt a lot of advertisers are just going to say, "here, take our money" -- many will probably want residuals.


Of course not. It's not done to make development cheaper. It's done to have more sources of cash to pay for it.

SMM, believe me, I'm very pro developer. But I think this in-your-face approach, if done in a straightforward manner, shows that the marketing folks are not thinking hard enough, or totally succumbing to advertiser's requests (What next ?). There should be more subtle way to make more money, be it advertising, placement, sponsorship or interactive marketing. I trust that your business folks will do the right thing for all of us.

 

[zed]

i recently read a report that in game advertising was pretty ineffective (prolly on gamasutra)
personally i have no major issue with in game ads, that real piece of new evil is the advent of 'micro transistions' + paying for aditional content
eg i recently read of a game wher u have to pay $5-10 for 5 new maps for the game, heres the new business model that im sure some companies follow

A/ make game
B/ remove some content
C/ sell said content a couple of months later to consumer for a few bucks

alternetively after #A release the game with some maps etc and whilst its in the shops make a few more maps for sale, benifits out the door earlier + more profits

 

[Farid]

It's inevitable. It's as simple as that.

Now, would they have the nerve to stream full blown video commercials during loadings of full priced games? Surely not, but you can sure expect a lot of demos, trailers, small/cheap downloadable games to come with a a healthy amount of video commercials.

The broadcasting networks are suffering every years from the loss of potential advertisment viewers (multiplicity of channels and thus people hoping on other channels during ads, PVRs, competition from other media, such as internet or videogames, etc..). This hurts the networks, but also the ad centrals which handle the commercial placements.
So, if people are not watching TV ads, but instead are playing videogames, well then the nice folks in charge of advertisement groups will simply bring the advertisement to them.
And people won't be able to do much against it. Just think about it, the console manufacturers, with their platform OSes, and the publishers, with their software, have access to a huge and extremely targeted sample of folks, who are forced to watch their screen (once the loading is done, the game can start right away.)

It's just way too obvious not to happen. It's a matter of when, not if.
And the fact that you can target a particular crowd is making this a fantastic ad stream for the marketeers. You can display toys ads during Spongebob loadings, expensive sneaker ads during Madden loadings, etc...

And as Acert pointed out, you will surely have to face longer than what they should have been loadings. We might see every, well thoses that rely a lot on ad streams, games install themselves on the HDD at the first start, some sort of initial long loading. Just to give them a reason to have a long ad before every play.
Anyway, that's the price to pay for... Hmm... I don't know what we get in return, as consumers, but at least we know the price we have to pay for it, heh.

 

[Acert93]

Maybe it's because I'm a game developer that I don't know this, but... what's a profit?

Profit? You need to ask a publisher what those are

 

[patsu]

The broadcasting networks are suffering every years from the loss of potential advertisment viewers (multiplicity of channels and thus people hoping on other channels during ads, PVRs, competition from other media, such as internet or videogames, etc..). This hurts the networks, but also the ad centrals which handle the commercial placements.
So, if people are not watching TV ads, but instead are playing videogames, well then the nice folks in charge of advertisement groups will simply bring the advertisement to them.

The ad agencies have themselves to blame for the cave-in in the advertising industry. Advertising is becoming less and less effective, they are also unmeasurable (Nielson is not it).

Many agencies screw their customers with high price and little value add. Many get deals to try to win advertising awards (regardless of the effectiveness), which justify their high price. Remember those useless Ring of Light and ineffective viral campaigns ?

Large customers can also buy media slots directly from the stations at lower costs today, many agencies do not bulk buy for their premium customers anymore, etc. etc.

Advertising won't go away, but there are more subtle, more effective and trackable form of marketing in the digital world. I hope we will see more of them soon.

 

[Rainbow Man]

Maybe it's because I'm a game developer that I don't know this, but... what's a profit? I've never heard of them. If anything, I'd say that this would go into the company's pocket to reduce losses.

Yes, I'm sure every game ever made created a loss in the end, which totally explains why the games industry has continued to grow on a pretty much yearly basis ever since the early 80s crash..

Peace.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Profit? You need to ask a publisher what those are

Bah... The ones you really need to ask are the retailers. The vast majority of games never turn a profit for publisher either, let alone developer. For every Halo which pulls in $100 million in revenues in a weekend, there are 50 games that sell a grand total of 10,000 copies in a lifespan of 5 years. Of course, everybody sees Halo and says "That's proof that gaming is the most lucrative business in the universe!"

But I think this in-your-face approach, if done in a straightforward manner, shows that the marketing folks are not thinking hard enough, or totally succumbing to advertiser's requests (What next ?). There should be more subtle way to make more money, be it advertising, placement, sponsorship or interactive marketing.

Maybe, but we're not in a vacuum here. The more subtle you try to play it, the less you're going to get out of it, and the more strings there will be attached to every dollar. And when you start playing that game, it ultimately means more units need to sell to get the same net revenues. Even though it's easy to place blame here and there like the way a major publisher will often totally screw small independent developers or the way Walmart totally screws everyone up their asses and sh**s into their open wounds, you can't really say that it's out of malice on their parts. If I was working at a publisher, I'd probably support a lot of the same decisions they do make. They're all acting on the side of caution because quite frankly, it's NOT lucrative. And there simply aren't enough consumers to get it there.

 

[patsu]

Maybe, but we're not in a vacuum here. The more subtle you try to play it, the less you're going to get out of it, and the more strings there will be attached to every dollar.

It depends on how marketing does it. Subtle does not necessarily mean less effective. Conversely, in-your-face does not necessarily mean more effective. e.g., It depends on what the offer is, how it's presented. You may also do the marketing after a gaming session, in in-game newsletter, or have a separate site like myresistance.net.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

It depends on how marketing does it. Subtle does not necessarily mean less effective. Conversely, in-your-face does not necessarily mean more effective. e.g., It depends on what the offer is, how it's presented. You may also do the marketing after a gaming session, in in-game newsletter, or have a separate site like myresistance.net.

Not arguing that, but you'd have a hard time convincing companies of that. Being subtle as far as they're concerned is not too different from hiding the ad altogether or just having too infrequent views (which an in-game newsletter type of thing would fall under). And display on a site like myresistance.net is certainly acceptable as a venue, but at the same time, is something that should be cheap, and therefore, they won't put that much money on the table for that.

 

[patsu]

Not arguing that, but you'd have a hard time convincing companies of that. Being subtle as far as they're concerned is not too different from hiding the ad altogether or just having too infrequent views (which an in-game newsletter type of thing would fall under). And display on a site like myresistance.net is certainly acceptable as a venue, but at the same time, is something that should be cheap, and therefore, they won't put that much money on the table for that.

Hmm... I understand where you're coming from. You're talking about advertising. I'm suggesting a combination of interactive marketing and advertising. The former is a growing pie because it's more effective/measurable, while the latter a shrinking one (and most likely going to shrink some more in terms of spending).

e.g., On myresistance.net, you should not try banner ads (It will only cover your hosting fee). But it can be used as microsites and loyalty portal for all your campaigns (offline and online).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Going by this report (In-game ads fail to influence consumers, says specialist), from the sounds of it advertisers only class an ad a successful if the player is spending time looking at it. I'm sure they'd choose loading ads of in-game ads if this report is to be believed. I'll stick to playing Rogue Galaxy then

As others have said, it can be done tastefully. Nike/Adidas adverts in a sports game make sense and no-one would begrudge them. Loading adverts that'll fit in with Oblivion or GeoW are probably impossible to do well.

 

[Sankari]

If the commercials would be as great as Sony bravia commercials, then I wouldn't mind it too much but it would get really boring in the end to watch the same commercial over and over again.

 

[Graham]

...
Preferrably we either remove loadtime, or do stuff like old style games during load times OR what NBA Live did with a "sandbox" deal.

Was that similar to what they did in the FIFA demo? Where you could control a single character practising with the keeper while the game loaded? I initially thought it was the full demo It was so good I actually ended up spending more time playing the 'loading screen' than the match proper - not to mention it looked better too.

Whoever thought of that was a genius. Music was god awful though.


As for the original post, as much as I don't like to say, it's probably a good idea (for the ad companies). You tune out while waiting for the game to load, so having some subversive subliminal advertising quietly slipped in would probably work quite well. Not that I'd like it, I'd cringe every time - and subsequently feel more irritated with the product than it can probably manage itself.

Plus it's only going to lengthen the load time too...

[thinks off on a tangent]

Does anyone know if the xbox/live EULA make mention of anonymous disclosure of personal information such as location to advertisers? The only advertising I could see myself even bothering to read would be about something local, and technical - put in an ad ticker into a game, like PGR3 has an achievement ticker down the bottom in the online menu (it will inform you of random things other players in the world have just done, like increasing rank, winning a cup, etc. Pointless, but nice and good to read if you are waiting on something). That way it could work in any game. Make it useful, product placement and the various subtle forms currently used simply have me roll my eyes and mentally put that product on my 'well it can't sell itself by word of mouth, so it's not worth my time' list - but I do that for most forms of advertising.

 

[archangelmorph]

Ok I can see it's pretty obvious that the majority of people here think the idea of load-time ads stink..

But what if we're talking about game-ads..?

I've always wondered why publishers and even hardware vendors never leveraged their s/w in a way that could maximise profits by shamefully plugging the rest of there s/w line?

For example..

What about Splinter Cell 5 where, during the initial load (not talking about loading in between levels), the game stores a number of ads on the disk (6-7, so as to not get monotonous) and picks one at random to display.. Each ad is specifically aimed and plugged another ubisoft title (Rainbow Six vegas, Assassin's creed etc..)

I think this wouldn't be too bad an idea since it could have the following advantages..:

- Increased s/w exposure for the publisher (free marketing)
- Ads can be related to the game by things like genre, target audience etc..
- Gamer gets to see game footage of other titles..
- Idea could be expanded so publishers could make money by allowing other (smaller devs for example) to get massive marketing exposure on their IPs by placing ads in the publishers own top-selling titles..
- H/w vendors (Sony, MS etc..) can use it to plug new H/w peripherals (a steering wheel ad in a 3rd party racing game for example..)

Just a thought I guess..

:smile:

 

[scooby_dooby]

You do realize, of course, that without that, you'd be paying over $300 a month, right (well, not exactly, since what you're actually paying for is the service, but you kind of get what I mean)? I despise commercials as much as the next person, but I'd rather suffer that than not get anything at all for my money. So I watch an episode of House and wait through 20 minutes of commercials... at least House is there for me to watch rather than never being there for anybody to watch.

Meh, it's not like TV would cease to exist if the revunue streams were less, there;s stiull a ton of money on the table, and a service that is in demand. And why does it need to be 33%? Why not 10%? That would be much more reasonable to me, it bothers me quiter a bit to pay $100 and spend 1/3 of the time being shown shit I don't want to see...and I know it won't change, but it's just so ass backwards.

It's the same feeling I get when I pay $40 for the GF and me to go to a movie, and they show me commercials for 10 minutes(not trailers, car commercials etc). Like, come on!

 

[Skrying]

I wish more developers would just directly sell their content themselves. Bypass both publisher and retailer. While I understand the market is not at a point where you'd make much (I'm correct in assuming the great majority of games are still bought retail as far as PCs go?). But it would allow a game developer to charge $50 and all of that go directly to them besides bandwidth cost, which really is not that high.

 

[pc999]

And as Acert pointed out, you will surely have to face longer than what they should have been loadings. We might see every, well thoses that rely a lot on ad streams, games install themselves on the HDD at the first start, some sort of initial long loading. Just to give them a reason to have a long ad before every play.

Overall I agre with you.

That is the bigest problem that I find in having add in games, specially because there are games without loadings, eg in Metroid Prime here thy could put a add, meybe in the start up but would that be enought, from the ads company POV) after that any add would directly mean a diferent content or a diferent way to play the game, which would make it a diferent game.

Anyway, that's the price to pay for... Hmm... I don't know what we get in return, as consumers, but at least we know the price we have to pay for it, heh

We need to have something in return, if not someone would use that to surpase them, that is beauty of the capitalism , at least if you give them the time .

Going by this report (In-game ads fail to influence consumers, says specialist), from the sounds of it advertisers only class an ad a successful if the player is spending time looking at it. I'm sure they'd choose loading ads of in-game ads if this report is to be believed. I'll stick to playing Rogue Galaxy then

That is good at least they will not #$"&#/"@ directly the content of our games.

As others have said, it can be done tastefully. Nike/Adidas adverts in a sports game make sense and no-one would begrudge them. Loading adverts that'll fit in with Oblivion or GeoW are probably impossible to do well

There is a XB game, Deathrow a futuristic sports game, here they have fictional adds in the loading screen, if it is something like that ie: loading as no bigger than it need to be, match between game and the add and also game art and add art, still much more time than anyone would like looking at a add... that it could work very well for every one evolved as I still remember the adds (555-Nuke) but they never made me have less pleasure than I could have from the game.

To bad it isnt a solution for every game.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Meh, it's not like TV would cease to exist if the revunue streams were less, there;s stiull a ton of money on the table, and a service that is in demand. And why does it need to be 33%? Why not 10%? That would be much more reasonable to me, it bothers me quiter a bit to pay $100 and spend 1/3 of the time being shown shit I don't want to see...and I know it won't change, but it's just so ass backwards.

It's interesting comparing subscription TV with the BBC. For a fee, the Beeb gets 4 TV channels and a load of radio stations without adverts. Elliminate a lot of the cheap trash from cable/satellite, and I'm sure advert free, quality subscription services are possible. I think the problem is these companies are run for profit...making entertaining TV isn't enough. They want to expand their corporate empire.

By the same token, it's possible to fund quality gaming without needing to resort to invasive adverts. The problem is publishers don't want to just make entertaining games, but want a corporate empire. Looking at EA, they don't need more money, but I'm sure they'll jump at the chance of adverts in games if they can!