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In Game Advertising Won't Fix Bad Business Model

by Matthew Perry
03/07/2006

A while back, Half-Life 2 developer Valve got furious over an incident in which a company called 'Engage' apparently used technology from the advertising company IGA to plaster ads for Subway on a whole bunch of official Counter Strike: Source servers. Valve released a statement stating that they were most displeased and that nothing that IGA did was legal or authorized by Valve. They have now, however, gone on to say that they have realized that IGA apparently "has always sought to honor the intellectual property rights of the owners of games in which its advertising is inserted. IGA takes its responsibility to obtain such permission very seriously."

After that note, I was happy. I mean, hey, one less lawsuit in the game industry means one less chance for people to say that we're all silly and frivolous. However, I then noticed this in the statement: "Valve and IGA look forward to discussing mutually beneficial opportunities in the future."

Looking forward to mutually beneficial opportunities with IGA? Maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but that sounds a lot like Valve is considering marketing in-game advertising with these goobers. I understand that production costs and times have increased dramatically in the last few years, but I thought that was the reason that I'm going to have to shell out $60 for the latest next-gen game. In-game advertising is just not cool.

Why? Because video games are an escape from reality. When I'm driving a Porsche Carerra GT through through city streets, I don't want to go past a Burger King. If I'm playing a tactics based shooter, I don't want to have to purchase my ammo from Wal-Mart. When we start dealing with corporate presence in video games, we lose a good deal of why we came to them in the first place.

"Now Matt," you say, "Counter-Strike is still going to be just as fun with all those Subway ads in DE-Dust!" And I somewhat agree. Aside from what I said above regarding the alternate reality factor, there are other implications that come with corporate fingers reaching into our games. What implications?

Let's just say, hypothetically, that McDonald's starts an advertising campaign within Counter-Strike: Source. Ronald McDonald's childhood-scarring face appearing on the map is one thing, but what about when the big red clown doesn't want to be in such a violent game? What about when McDonald's suggests that they can reach a bigger audience if the game is rated T instead of M? So, take out the blood clouds and the splatters when you shoot a terrorist. Now the game drops a rating and that's all the more parents who might buy the game, all the more kids who might want a Big Mac after pwning some n00bz, all the more money that McDonald's makes. But when that happens, when the marketability of the advertisers takes priority over what the developers want - not the publishers, but what the actual artists and the coders desire their project to be, then the corporations have gone too far.

Take, for example, Electronic Arts, now known by the handle "EA Games." Back in the day, EA was just like any other game developer. They made and sold games. Then, they went public, and things started to change. The best example I can come up with is the Command and Conquer series, originally under the creative control and design of Westwood Studios. The CnC games used to be famous for their cool (although very campy) live action cutscenes. In the original Red Alert, the alternate history Stalin killed several of his advisors on camera. In Tiberian Sun, Kane's right hand man slashed a traitor's throat in front of hundreds of NOD soldiers, to the cheers of the crowd and the approval of Kane (who, by the way, lives in death).

Then, towards the end of TS's development cycle, EA Games came into the picture. Soon after in the CnC games, blood made a mysterious disappearance. No longer would blood gush when units were crushed under the treads of tanks. When a nuclear missile goes off in Washington D.C. in Red Alert 2, everyone just falls over. The only on camera violence that we see in RA2 is when a silo operator pulls a gun on his partner, who is, we assume, shot offscreen. I'm not saying that games need blood and gore to be good (I love the Heroes of Might and Magic series, which is blood free) but what I am saying is that when a corporation is involved, nine times out of ten, they will do whatever they can to sell the most units possible, often ignoring what the developer would put into the game under different circumstances.

I want to touch on now, if I can, the issue of rising game production costs and why that means that games must be more expensive. You see, to me, that's a bit funny. I happen to know this one company that has a series of games that you can buy, play, and enjoy for pretty cheap. There's no monthly fees to play it online, you can get the game and what is essentially it's expansion pack for twenty bucks. All told, that's ninety different characters to play as, seven vehicles to tear apart the landscape, eight different gametypes, and, oh, around one hundred and twenty maps, not including any of the 'bonus packs' created by the community. On top of that, the company just released a new pack of content, completely free. Give up?

Try Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 2004. One of the most widely played games online, a favorite of fans and new comers, and chock full of content. The game was originally released for just $40, and if you already had UT03, it was only $30. After the game was released, they added more and more content, up to the point that I honestly can't tell you what my favorite deathmatch map is - I haven't played them all yet. How much did the additional content cost? Nothing. Zip, nada, zilch. And for people who wanted to pick up the game later on down the road and not have to download all the extra content all at once to be up to date, they're set, too. Everything except the latest bonus pack and patch are in the Editor's Choice Edition, with the price knocked down fifteen dollars (the original UT04 now goes for $10, ECE for $25) and it's available on CD and DVD.

The rest of the games industry would have you believe that a business model like that would fail. After all, Epic does all of that, sponsors a one million dollar contest, develops a next gen engine, starts working on a next-next gen engine, and even gets a new swankier office to work in. How do they do it? They make only a few games... but they're quality games. Look at companies like Activision and Atari, EA and Vivendi. They're going through lay-offs and cut backs, closing offices and sending people to Monster to find a new job. But Epic is constantly hiring. The reason for this is because their games sell. When I look at all the games that have been coming out from the labels I just mentioned, tons of them are just crappy. They're sequels to other crappy games, or the latest in a sports franchise. Woo, it's hockey roster update, 2006!

Andrew and I were in a Blockbuster a few days ago, looking for more console games to rent and review. We were looking around the store for quality games, and I made an observation to him that, out of all of the games there, there were maybe 15 or 20 that were the level of quality that we would even consider renting. Sure, they have Resident Evil 4, God of War, and a few others, but, come on! What's with all these other games? Back in the day (yeah, I'm sayin' it), if I went to Blockbuster, I could pick up a random SNES game and, more than likely, it was good, and even if it wasn't Chrono Trigger or FF6 quality graphics, it was fun. So, when I look in the game section now, I'm sad to see all the games that are, for lack of a better phrasing, just crap. I counted three separate poker games, one of which was a sequel to another one. I saw tons of sports games that offered no new features, no graphical improvement, nothing more than a few players that were added or changed teams in the previous season.

So, here is what I propose. The game industry needs to stop spending their money on developing poor, shoddy games. When they do that, they cause good programmers to lose their jobs, destroy the faith of their fans, and cause the game industry, as a whole, to sag. Developers don't need to raise the price of their games. They don't need to start in-game advertising, nor do they need to even implement simple product placement. What developers need to do, in the simplest terms, is focus. Focus on making a few good games. Make them exceptional - all the money that is going into these crappy games should be redirected toward innovation, improvement, and playability. Not sequels. Not junk. Sell the games for a decent price, like Epic, and maybe then they can start making a profit and stop contributing to the atrophy of the hobby that we all love.

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