by
Matt Hickey
on
March 20, 2007
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I can imagine it now, thousands of online video gamers are insulted, traumatized, and finally let down (after actually checking out the ads) by the first wave of Google ads:
“Lonely playing video games? Check out your area singles at http://www.gamerdatingnetwork.com”
“Find your true Halo 3 love today!”
“Tired of your Wii not putting out? Try a PS3 today!”
Jon Lee, I doubt that there will be literal ads. It will be more along the product placement line.
I think this is a good idea. As long as it doesn’t impede game play then there is plenty to be excited about. If the revenue of in-game ads sky rockets after this purchase game prices will go down and there will be more developers.
Product placement is fine, personally I think it even adds an aspect of realism. I don’t care if madden mentions that one of my players has Nike cleats…
Out
I’m pretty sure it would be more of click here type ads, and I highly doubt that advertising will drop the price that a gamer pays. Seriously why would a company add a way of making more money to drop their revenue in another area.
Good, point Ryan Hood. It probably would not decrease the value of games. It would, however increase the quality of games. More revenue = more developers, better equipment, etc. Click here type ads *would* make game play terrible, Google wouldn’t be that stupid. And advertising in games has been going on for a while, hasn’t done anything bad though. Google will just figure out how to make the situation more profitable.
Out
Also, dropping the price of a game wouldn’t necessarily mean less revenue. It could promote higher sales figures…
I still wonder though, how applicable would these ads be? I mean you’re kind of limited to what world you’d even have ads in. For example, more popular games like WoW for PC, or Halo 2 or whatever for consoles, etc, they have almost no ad space to put in game. Sure you have a few online games such as the Madden series, but those have such a limited player base compared to the most popular games.
I can see where Google is trying to go with this, but it is still such a nascent market that I can’t really see them pulling this off to well. Looks like another bid to secure one more piece of the market by buying something out rather than develop it to it’s fullest extent.
On another note, I hope that Google doesn’t go nuts with this new Adspace power. I remember listening to NPR a while ago (don’t mock me), and I heard about an ad which was inserted through Massive Software which required the player to interact with the ad to continue through the game.