At Ubisoft’s presentation with Microsoft Advertising’s Gaming Upfront (you can just taste the evil oozing off of that name) they revealed that they intend to pepper their new game Splinter Cell Conviction with copious amounts of paid advertising. Not only do they want you mentally shopping during the game’s gruesome torture sequences, they’re shilling out any other piece of in-game real estate to the highest bidder as well. At the conference, they showcased what they call “heat maps”, a layout of the most heavily traversed or easy to spot places to slap an ad for Dr. Scholls.
I don’t mind the idea of advertisements in certain types of games. In sports and racing titles they’re relatively inoffensive and in some ways add realism. When it comes to action titles like Splinter Cell, fictional stories of fictional people in a fictional setting, it breaks the illusion of reality to see a big fat Whopper plastered on the wall. We’re paying good money for these games. Don’t you think developers owe us better?
Via: Joystiq
I miss Steve Carell’s Ad Naseum segment on The Daily Show…
If you were getting electrocuted in-game using a car battery, and they sold the battery branding to Die Hard, or Interstate, etc. as advertising, that would be okay.
If there is a level in a mall, I can see some diverse advertising opportunities there.
I don’t want a serious/hardcore game littered with out of place ads though.
Most of the time I don’t mind in game advertising. Product placement can add a nice level of realism to games, and the only time I’ve ever seen it done excessively was in Rainbow Six Vegas where ALL of the cars and trucks were Dodges.
However, it would be nice to see some benefit from all this advertising passed onto the consumers.
@Glassninja I just think there’s an overly large amount of ads being seen everywhere these days, and while most are fairly unobtrusive (for example, the delightful ads seen on the incredible NegativeGamer.com), There comes a point where they just become laughable.
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