This piece is intended to present a short thought-experiment in regards to the ever-increasing prevalence of ads in our lives. With their ubiquitous presence and the development of ever more complex ways of ad targeting and display technologies, ads have become a part of our lives. From million dollar spots in the Super Bowl towards content-locks happening unless we allow ads to be forced upon us, ads will eventually become more of an issue than they already are.
This issue in itself isn’t much attractive at the outset – ads are naturally (and correctly) viewed as intrusions in our choice of content. I know how much I loathe using any ad-imbibed products. But the key point here isn’t the fact that ads exist – they will always do so. It’s the way they are delivered.
There are some situations where ads make sense, and are even a vital component of a product’s marketing and monetization. Free-to play smartphone games and services such as Spotify or YouTube have to find ways of delivering content free of charge while achieving business sustainability. That “there are no free meals” is true for almost every aspect of our lives; but such a mantra is the lifeblood of companies. However, in some cases, ads are jarring, obtrusive, and can ruin an experience. Enter ads in computer games.
The steady increase of Triple-A games’ development costs is a much touted fact. Some have even called for an increase in overall retail pricing of AAA games – increasing its price from the usual $60 so as to allow developers to better recoup their investment. Others, however, speak of further exploration on the introduction of ads in games. Some look at loading screens and see a idle opportunity for an ad. Others look at billboards, t-shirts, and in-game locations as being the best possible places for ad placement. Inserting ad revenue into a AAA game would work towards giving developers a new revenue stream; and the fact that many games now feature always-online connections would give developers and advertisers the possibility of curating their content, employing analytics regarding attention-span capture, angle of viewing, time-on-camera, and many other metrics.
However, are ads in games something we can live with – or even want? My opinion is causality’s favorite: it depends.
I do expect future games to incorporate in-game real-life ads at some point in time. I think it’s not a matter of “if”, but a matter of “when”. But is there a reason why Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s ads need to be handcrafted at all, when the creators can just run some real ones and make some money in the process? Naturally, this would mean the ads would have to be carefully selected so as to not break gameplay immersion. They have to make sense in the game world, feel organic. Thus, an advertisement for a 3D printer, or the latest sci-fi movie, might make sense in Mankind Divided’s world. And in a game grounded at least partially in our world, in our time frame, it might even make sense to run some Chanel Nº 5 ads. Enter Watch Dogs 2, with its San Francisco depiction. Would it really be so strange, so jarring, if some of the restaurants mirrored some of its life-like counterparts? Throw in a McDonald’s, a Subway, advertisements for Mercedes and Chevrolet, and include car models of them among the dull, generic, no-brand ones that the game has, and wouldn’t the game world become more grounded in reality? “Nah, I don’t want this piece of junk. Why would I? I’m sure there is a sweet Camaro somewhere around here.”
What we need, if there is anything in advertisement that we do, is smart ads. Ads that have had some thought put into them towards integration with the game world. Mass Effect: Andromeda is a few days from dropping officially. Imagine that Bioware, or EA, struck a deal with a company, such as Shell, for ads inside their space-opera game (dear god, no!) Would Andromeda colonists wearing Shell-branded t-shirts make sense? Or having a Shell sticker on the side of Tempest? I’d say that no, they wouldn’t, and that would probably elicit some cries of agony and anger from my part. Now imagine that there is a Codex entry on Shell having been one of the old-Earth fossil fuel companies to heavily invest in new technologies. That entry expands, telling of how some of those technologies were integrated into the Tempest. And that’s the reason why you see an actual Shell logo on some parts of the Tempest engine room (sadly, Tali won’t be there). Would that be that jarring? And entertain the idea that Blue Origin actually wins the space race against SpaceX. Wouldn’t the appearance of some Amazon-branded boxes in the upcoming Prey be somewhat explainable through the addition of a newspaper clip somewhere in the game world, detailing how Blue Origin spawned TranStar? And how Amazon went on to become the single most powerful corporation in the setting?
Now imagine a McDonald’s ad in the loading screen of Dishonored 2, or a Pizza Hut video running in the loading screen for Andromeda’s Habitat 5… Yeah.
If the implementation wasn’t obtrusive, immersion-breaking, made sense (appearing in TV screens and posters around the game world), and if I saw a benefit from seeing these ads peppered throughout my game (like a $30 price-tag on a $60 AAA game, for instance), I don’t think I’d mind. However, there are two factors which I think would have to be taken into consideration in any AAA game looking to incorporate ads into its world: sensible, tailored, organic ad placement and development that is built within the game world; and that gamers see a practical benefit from the ads’ inclusion. You want to put ads into my game? Fine. I don’t want them to break or jar my experience, I want them to enrich the game world, and I want to see a discount on its off-the shelf price. I don’t require much, now do I?
Do you agree? Where do you stand in the inclusion of ads in your games?Note to our forum users: this piece is marked as an Editorial
