Imagine it, you sit down and unwrap your fresh copy of Splinter Cell Conviction, put it into your machine and ready yourself for a roller coaster ride of espionage, violence and, err, deodorants? Negative Gamer’s Jeff “Analoge” recently reported on the news that Splinter Cell Conviction will feature increased in-game advertising with “heat maps” that show advertisers where players frequent the most on a level. Ubisoft’s Jeffrey Dickstein was quoted to have said that while players are smashing people’s faces against walls, they could be thinking: “is this the new Degree deodorant I should buy?” Yep, he actually said that.
Of course in-game adverts are nothing new, and certainly not to Ubisoft who featured them heavily in the previous Splinter Cell games (remember the Nokia ads?) and especially the Rainbow Six series. If you do remember seeing ads in those games, you’ll remember one thing: they were freaking annoying.
Games designers try and fail to push ads into the game in a subtle and believable way, having NOKIA splashed on the screen for 30 seconds every level is just plain annoying. Sure, if your protagonist uses a Nokia phone, that’s believable but developers are rarely that subtle. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory featured an ad for an American movie in a North Korean nuclear missile silo, something that is utterly insane. Wikipedia claims that in 2005 the in-game advertising business was worth $53 million and is set to increase to anything up to $1.8 billion by 2010, a staggering number that means ads are only going to increase, while becoming even more gratuitous.
You could argue that yes, we see so much product placement or advertising (try counting how many Sony products there are in Casino Royale) in movies or TV, what’s a little more in videogames? The problem is, where will it stop? Sports games have some organic merit, racing games too, but what about games like Bioshock 2? What about Grand Theft Auto V?
What happens if in-game advertising becomes a vital industry method to make money? If executives see that they can double or triple their profits, how could they say no to putting deodorant ads into their in-depth story driven titles? There’s a huge risk that videogames could lose some of their value because of a need to maximise income.
But the real point is not that the ads are placed distastefully, it’s that they’re there at all. After paying an (increasingly) hefty amount for a videogame does it not seem a little odd that we then have to endure yet more companies trying to sell us stuff in an utterly unintelligent way? Just for a few hours a week I’d like to escape to a world where I’m not being sold corporate messages about how I need to buy certain products, especially when that escapism involves sneaking around assassinating people. Just look at the Xbox 360’s Dashboard, despite you paying £200 for the console and £40 a year for Xbox Live you still get ads! Companies like Activision, who are bent on turning videogames into annually released titles are focused on simply boosting sales.
Adverts don’t add anything, they detract from the gameplay and pull me out of the world that the developers have tried so hard to envelop me in. Videogames are unique in their interactivity, with a movie you’re watching passively but with a vidoegame you’re much more involved, you’re engaged in the world. But of course it’s not about if the ads are organic to the game, it’s about if I remembered that Nokia advertised in a game I haven’t played for two years. That’s why in-game advertising is going to grow: not because it should, but because it works.
