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A L S O_ T O D A Y
T A B L E__T A L K What's the dream operating system for cruising the Internet? It's another Mac vs. Windows go-round in the 21st area of Table Talk
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R E C E N T L Y A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals? Silicon Follies Tipping the antitrust scales Repurposing Ada "E-mail is a real revolution" - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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COMING SOON TO COMPUTER GAMES -- ADVERTISING | PAGE 1, 2
The idea of selling ads in games is also appealing to some independent game developers, like CEO Mike Wilson of Gathering of Developers (and formerly of Ion Storm), who hopes that new revenue sources might support the astronomical cost of producing a hit game. There is hope that a great game could bring in big mainstream advertisers, and therefore big revenues; Simon Whitcombe, director of the Imagine Games Network, thinks this isn't such a remote idea. "If you look at gaming as a category, you can see it would be valuable to mainstream advertisers, because 12- to 17-year-old boys are a notoriously hard demographic to target," says Whitcombe. "Our demographic is hugely appealing to a number of mainstream advertisers -- Coke, McDonald's are already associating themselves with video games, particular in the sports category." But there are also skeptics. Take, for example, the case of product placement. Conducent plans to enable "hot" product placement within games -- so that a click on a bag of M&Ms in a game, for example, could take you to an M&Ms Web site. But although commercial products have appeared in games in the past -- mostly as "Easter egg" surprises buried in the games (such as the Coke cans that rolled out of a vending machine in the game Half Life), or as authentic touches (such as the Pennzoil ads on cars in NASCAR racing games) -- there have been no cases of paid product placement, or at least none that a survey of game publishers can recall. And it's not that developers haven't tried. "I was trying to be the first to do product placement in games with Quake," says Wilson. No one was interested, he says. "The people who do product placement are looking at a bigger audience than the PC gamers. It's not attractive for people to put money into, even though it's a great demographic." Only a tiny number of games, he points out, sell half a million copies -- and even that is a drop in the bucket compared to film or television viewership. Still, there are those who hope the use of advertisements in games will actually increase the gaming population. Paul Bader, CEO of the DVD game company Multimedia 2000, believes that producers could drop the prices of games if they get enough ad revenue, thereby increasing the number of people who play them. His company is developing a line of DVD games that incorporate e-commerce ads and technology, similar to that of Conducent, and he hopes to eventually be able to give the games away for free. "My contention is that content as we know it today -- books, music, videos, software, games -- within a few years will be given away to drive people to retail sites," says Bader. "The only cost the customer will bear will be the cost of getting it to the customer. A $59.99 game today will be $6 at Target, and it will springboard you to a Web site or e-commerce site." That's one view of the way ad revenue could be used. There is also a good possibility that ad revenue will line the pockets of a few already-wealthy game publishers, instead of lowering prices for consumers. And that certainly won't make those picky and noisy gamers very happy. As Stephen Heaslip, editor of the gaming news site Blues News, puts it, "If they drop the price to $20 and say, 'OK, we'll put in some ads,' they might not have problems with gamers. But if they sell $60 games and just stick an ad in there, there will definitely be a negative reaction." Wilson, for example, doesn't anticipate that there would be any major problems with mainstream titles, like Deer Hunter or NBA Basketball, but the rabid constituencies of "hardcore" gaming titles (such as Doom or Age of Empires) probably would be upset. He believes there would have to be a way to fast-forward through the ads -- after all, hardcore gamers are often too impatient even to sit through the video sequences at the beginning of games. That may be why there's been no rush so far to publicly embrace Conducent's ad technology. "If a publisher did announce they would be putting ads in games, they'd get flamed like you wouldn't believe. It would be a PR nightmare, and the publishers know it. Gamers are the single most vocal crowd out there," says Jessica Mulligan, who writes an Online Games Insider column. "Game publishers have credibility issues already with the customers, due to the increasing number of bugs and problems in costly retail games. They don't need an uproar over ads." Which may be why Conducent, Eidos and the Imagine Games Network all emphasize that they are first going to launch the advertisements in demos -- the free "trial" downloadable versions of upcoming games. "Considering that gamers are getting a free demo, I don't think it's a bad idea to put a little information in for them," says Eidos' Keith. "But right now we're definitely only considering doing this with demos -- we can't make an educated decision how we would do it in a full game." It will also probably take a while to convince the game developers to include the technology in the games, says Keith. So don't expect a full-screen promo for Gap khakis to appear in the middle of your Tomb Raider 3 game in the next few weeks. Considering the increasing ubiquity of advertising in every other aspect of our lives, however, it's only a matter of time.
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