TV-style Commercials In Games
Starting this summer, be prepared to see actual advertisement spots in games :
Short TV-style commercials will make their way into the video game world starting in the summer as in-game advertising provider Massive Inc. plans to debut 10-second spots on its network next month.
While this practice is nothing new in games nowadays, displaying 10-second long spots (and not only still images or “cameos” of actual products, such as the smartphone in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow) may be another matter. Any other aspect put aside, the intrusiveness of said ads may be the biggest problem; it’s already hard enough as it is to cope with the many popups and other intrusive banners we run in every time we visit a handful of websites, but if they’re to interrupt gameplay, there’s going to be a few TV-murders along the road. Fortunately, it seems that this has been so far approached with a certain dose of logics: the ads are to appear in scenes where they’d look like something natural and realistic, for instance when a character walks into a room where a TV set is on.
Some games had already made their players get used to advertisement in context– I remember the ad panels in Anarchy Online (some were fake ads, some were for the game’s add-ons), that were actually more funny to look at than really annoying, as they wouldn’t get in the way and were simply part of the background. On the other hand, we see ads everywhere, and it can and will become quickly tiresome if they get overused in games like they got overused everywhere else.
The interfering with gameplay – or rather, its hoped absence – will likely be the key in here. This, and finding the right balance between nothing and too much, without a backlash occurring in the middle.
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