GameTap is moving towards a new model where they will offer numerous games free of charge. They are seeking to garner the attention of the casual audience who isn’t interested in paying the 10$ a month to check out the services. While not all games will be made available to those who want to check out the site for free, several selections, rated up to T, will be accessible to players thanks to the inclusion of advertisements. Players who wish to access all games and have ad free content can do so by paying the subscription fee of 9.95 a month.
While I have been a subscriber to GameTap for months now, mostly driven by my desire to play the Sam and Max adventure games, this development makes me reconsider how I feel about intrusive game advertisements. While I still am not sure how I feel about seeing Dodge Caliber billboards in games such as Crackdown, I am starting to see how advertisements can be integrated into gaming in a way that expands the community. Advertisements that run before the game starts might not be such a terrible thing if they cut down on the overall cost of the content. After all, if you could get xbox live games for free if you just had to sit through a 30 second commercial each time you started it up, would you be so miffed?
Of course there will always be places where game advertisements don’t work. If you had to see Sony ads in the middle of Middleearth it would take away from the game experience. However if it was possible to insert an ad, even just a brief picture of a company logo, at the beginning of the game that could translate into lower costs for both the developer and consumer, than I think that game advertising could be something I could get behind.
Lower costs and the possibility of making content free is not only good for the companies who have to afford the astronomical budget it costs to develop a major console release, but also for gaming as a whole. Price will always be an obstruction to the expansion of the audience. However if there was the possibility of playing content for free or for cheaper I think the player base of gaming could expand.
The pitfall of game advertising is that players, especially the hardcore ones, will always get fed up with them. Players who detest the 15 second load times in Oblivion will certainly cry when they have to sit through a 30 second commercial upon start up of a piece of software. But again I propose a question. What if there was the option to obtain a game for free or cheap, but it included ads, and then you could pay an additional fee to download some update that disabled the ads? Offering the potential to truly demo an entire arcade game, which you could then pay to disable the ads in, if you truly cared, could have some amazing potential.
Of course no one is saying this is going to happen and I have no reason to believe it to be so. I just read the GameTap news and got to wondering about how much advertising I would tolerate and how it could be beneficial and detrimental to our community. Your thoughts?
Chufmoney
My personal opinion is that in-game product placement is great as long as the content makes sense. Instead of a “cool drinks” machine, put in a damn Coca-Cola Machine. My only caveat is that it benefit the gamer via
1. Lowering the price of the game….or
2. Lowering the cost of development enough that we get games faster, better, or with more content
This does pose a problem in games like LOTR though because there probably isn’t a lot of ad money to be generated from a medieval setting. Leki walking staffs maybe? Budweiser mead?
I would love to see a publisher release 2 SKUs for a game as a test case in the future. One that was ad-driven and cheap/free and one with no ads at regular price, just to see what ratio of the 2 people choose.
As for the 30 second add each time you connect to LIVE, I think I could handle that because I would just grab a soda in the interim. Unfortunatley, I think a more-likely scenario would be a 15-30 second spot each time you start a new game or access the menu or settings.
One thing I can’t stand is sites like IGN that push a noisy, slow-loading flash ad that you have to click through to get to the linked content. Gah!
I have to say I loved some of the early Gametap ads, and haven’t gotten into it cause A. My comp still sucks, B. no real income. But honestly, I think some ads in there will not be the end of the world to get people interested. In Game advertising is just something that will happen, though I have to say I laughed pretty hard at the ideas Turkiye wrote about Medieval product placements. Though I’d have to say more money to get games out faster would not be a likely solution, nor would I want it to be. Games coming out slow is fine with me due to me not wanting crappy games. I have seen far too shitty games, mostly to rush them out to tie in with movies AKA Enter the Matrix (oh the ghost juices), That game had way too many glitches, not to mention a real lack of good gameplay. I would like to see Lowering the price of games though, but the standard of 50-60 for a new game doesn’t seem likely to change… God Bless the DS and it’s 30 dollar standard
Yeah Steve, I agree. I don’t want shortcutted games either. So I hope I didn’t give that impression. I just want advertising profits to benefit the gamers as well as the publishers. If in-game ads increase the profit for a certain title, that money could go toward increasing the size of the dev team, enabling them to ship product quicker…….or something like that.
Oh, I know you didn’t mean it like that. But I just think that when you add more money to a game, I think cheaper games would be the only side effect… But I have been wrong before. Maybe you’ll be right on both fronts, and maybe we will see Budweiser Mead…. god, I wouldn’t be able to stop laughing if I saw that in a LOTR game.