   Brands in Gaming
  I was reading a book and it states that gamers are not friendly to any corporation that tries to import its brand into a game of any sort.  This is evidence by The Sims Online game where McDonald put kiosks in the game and pretty much forced you to go there to support your life style.  Are there exceptions to this?  Can a FPS, action/adventure, RTS, or 3PS have this successfully implemented without offending the gamers?  I know sports games have marketers in their games but that is for a sense of realism.  Would you want to see a logo or business advertisement in FIFA or MADDEN that wasn't even a real entity yet?  What would this do for your gaming experience?   
  I like the marketing in SiN: Episode One - Emergence..."Delicious grape!  Ninjas love it, and so should you!"   ;Quote:Original post by kidd175I was reading a book and it states that gamers are not friendly to any corporation that tries to import its brand into a game of any sort.  This is evidence by The Sims Online game where McDonald put kiosks in the game and pretty much forced you to go there to support your life style.Can you see the obvious flaw there? It's not the presence of McDonald's in the game, it's that the game makes it mandatory that you support your sim by having it eat at the Golden Arches. Had McD's been just another food option, alongside Wendy's, Subway, chinese, Domino's/Papa John's and eating in, there would have been no backlash.The book is wrong. Brands appear in games all the time, and sometimes to mutual benefit. The last several NBA Live games from EA Sports have featured Nike shoes extensively, and sometimes exclusively. Every car in every OutRun game, ever, is a Ferrari. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory has Sprite vending machines in office lobbies. The list goes on.   ;Quote:Original post by kidd175... I know sports games have marketers in their games but that is for a sense of realism.  And this differs from the realism in all other aspects of life, how?Commercialism is a fact of life and certainly a predominate consideration in media.  I am over it.  I refuse to harbor any ill feelings towards developers for cooperating with the promotion of the enterprise in question, or the actual enterprise itself.  Games and movies have become incredibly expensive to make and advertisements simply help to cover the costs of development and promotion.  I am certainly not a fan of it, but its become pretty pointless to try to stop it.  Advertisements make money.  Simple enough and its easy enough to look past with a bit of practice.  If you can't get past this fact, realize that some companies or movies deal with advertisements (and dislike of commercialism) in a clever way.  Case in point, if you happen to watch Terminator 2 anytime soon, I advise you to watch the scene where the 2 terminators (T800 and T1000 meet for the first time in the back room of the mall behind the arcade) John Connor runs through the hall and it shows a worker with a can of Pepsi who appears to be deliberately showing the Lettering on the bottle for the purposes of shameless advertisement.  I frowned a bit when I saw this as I am not a big fan of blatant commercialism, but my expression rapidly changed when the T-1000 started shooting his gun and the worker and his Pepsi (which exploded) were shot into oblivion.  It was funny to see the Pepsi can, which had been so visually pronounced during a single moment, fulled with holes until the Pepsi product was disintegrated...Whether this was James Cameron's actual philosophical view of advertisements in general or if it was a conscious choice to show that he felt no love towards advertisements but acknowledged it was needed in order to receive proper funding and endorsements for the sake of his film, there are obviously clever ways to deal with a dislike for commercialism.) ;)   ;Quote:Original post by Rain 7I frowned a bit when I saw this as I am not a big fan of blatant commercialism, but my expression rapidly changed when the T-1000 started shooting his gun and the worker and his Pepsi (which exploded) were shot into oblivion.  It was funny to see the Pepsi can, which had been so visually pronounced during a single moment, fulled with holes until the Pepsi product was disintegrated...Whether this was James Cameron's actual philosophical view of advertisements in general or if it was a conscious choice to show that he felt no love towards advertisements but acknowledged it was needed in order to receive proper funding and endorsements for the sake of his film, there are obviously clever ways to deal with a dislike for commercialism.) ;)You haven't considered it was done on purpose? To make you remember. I have no real info on the scene or the director, and haven't even watched it, but you remember an unimportant worker's pepsi can. What if the pepsi wasn't shot? Would you still remember the pepsi? If lots of other people also remember that moment as a funny moment, then there is a great chance they will remember the pepsi and might even associate it with "fun". Well, or maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, and is just rambling.   ;Quote:Original post by CTarQuote:Original post by Rain 7I frowned a bit when I saw this as I am not a big fan of blatant commercialism, but my expression rapidly changed when the T-1000 started shooting his gun and the worker and his Pepsi (which exploded) were shot into oblivion.  It was funny to see the Pepsi can, which had been so visually pronounced during a single moment, fulled with holes until the Pepsi product was disintegrated...Whether this was James Cameron's actual philosophical view of advertisements in general or if it was a conscious choice to show that he felt no love towards advertisements but acknowledged it was needed in order to receive proper funding and endorsements for the sake of his film, there are obviously clever ways to deal with a dislike for commercialism.) ;)You haven't considered it was done on purpose? To make you remember. I have no real info on the scene or the director, and haven't even watched it, but you remember an unimportant worker's pepsi can. What if the pepsi wasn't shot? Would you still remember the pepsi? If lots of other people also remember that moment as a funny moment, then there is a great chance they will remember the pepsi and might even associate it with "fun". Well, or maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, and is just rambling....You completely missed my point.  Of course I have considered it was done on purpose, that is why I brought it up.  :)I wasn't debating whether or not it was an effective ad campaign for Pepsi...My point was that the limitations of commercialism (and marketing whoring) in a media setting can be overlooked if the execution is done in an artistic way, which it was.  Go rent T2 (its one of the best movies ever. :) ) You will see what I mean.;Quote:Original post by Strider_HiryuI like the marketing in SiN: Episode One - Emergence..."Delicious grape!  Ninjas love it, and so should you!"If you punch in the numbers on the posters into the comm stations, you get some pretty funny adverts.  Also, the signs were hilarious:  "Pipes: the new crate", and "An excess of crates may cause anger!".   ;  I paid money for your game, so I had better damn well not see any more advertisements, unless they amuse me so terribly that I see value in them.Showing a contempt for my money by making me pay a monthly fee and shoving McDonalds' advertising down my throat makes me want to uninstall your game and set your offices on fire.It's really as simple as that. Paying to be spammed to is obscene. If your game has a degree of advertising to the point where I notice it, it had better be free to play or to obtain.I am constantly irritated when going to the movies and seeing the 35-minute advertisement reels that play beforehand (trailers and just random ads) that I have paid $12 of my hard earned cash to see. I started buying more DVDs, until Fox and co started adding unskippable ads to the start of them. If society had its facilities in order, they'd probably see that paying $20 for a three-cent disc with unskippable ads is worthless regardless of the IP pressed to the disc, and take to the streets in protest.Or maybe I'm just cranky because some suit seems to think I should pay to look at their ads.   ;Quote:Original post by RavuyaI started buying more DVDs, until Fox and co started adding unskippable ads to the start of them. If society had its facilities in order, they'd probably see that paying $20 for a three-cent disc with unskippable ads is worthless regardless of the IP pressed to the disc, and take to the streets in protest.When I rented Fantastic Four and couldn't skip the ads I just about took the disc out to break it in half.  At least they haven't disabled the option to fast forward them (yet).;Quote:Original post by RavuyaI paid money for your game, so I had better damn well not see any more advertisements, unless they amuse me so terribly that I see value in them.Did you pay the cost of creating, marketing and distributing the game, or only a portion? If only a portion, is it reasonable for the publisher to include advertising to defray the remaining expense, much in the fashion of cable television?Before you answer, consider the alternative and its ramifications: raising the retail price of games. Would you pay an increased retail cost? Honestly? Do you think enough people will also stomach the direct hit to their disposable income to support the industry as a whole?The problems are complex - audiences are increasingly fragmented, making advertising less effective in bulk; production costs are ballooning out of control as a more sophisticated audience demands more refined content; increased diversity of content delivery reduces the return on each channel, or the expense of hitting most/all of them. The current situation is essentially an evolutionary mid-point between the concrete physical media available predominantly through manufacturer-controlled outlets of the recent past and the predominantly electronic, user-determined delivery of the near future.It'll work itself out. If you can't handle the tremors of the process, though, feel free not to spend any money on media. It'll be better for your blood pressure than all this ranting. [smile]   