Last Wednesday, we brought you news of developer Gearbox Software's partnership with Double Fusion to bring in-game advertisements to their upcoming titles, along with our honest opinion that such a move made no sense for a company built on sci-fi and period pieces. We may have spoke too soon.
At his official blog, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford asserts that he hates exploitive advertising just as much as we do, and instead of trying to charm gamers with empty promises of authenticity, he's got photographic evidence that Gearbox is the developer who may finally get it right.
What you're looking at is the authentic Philips logo and factory, as they looked in 1944...
...and here's the in-game advertisement for Philips, as it appears in Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. While it's true that the lettering has changed approximately zilch in the last eighty-odd years, this is about as far from objectionable as we could possibly hope for.
But evidence aside, the overarching theme of Randy's post is that Gearbox will retain creative control over their titles, and that the end goal of Gearbox is to include only those advertisements that can be naturally integrated, and use the increased revenue such advertisement brings to do right by their audience. He points out that it's in the best interests of advertisers as well:
The smart and successful advertisers' goal is for you to trust and respect them. If their ads invade or injure our entertainment, we get angry and reject them. If, however, something feels natural and unintrusive, they get the value they were looking for.
So what about Gearbox's sci-fi titles? Well, perhaps they won't have advertisements at all:
As of this post we haven't committed to any particular in-game advertising for any of our upcoming titles (including Hell's Highway, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and Borderlands). What we've done is to enable Double Fusion to connect us with opportunities.
Or perhaps they just won't impede the gameplay, a la Master Chief Mountain Dew.
Sometimes, cross-promotional activities exist outside of the game and the goal of these activities is to reach people. Examples include the special "Halo" version of Mountain Dew that was launched just before Halo 3 came out. The value that this kind of activity brings is that it gets more attention for the game. For people who care about our games, the idea of bringing more people to the games is very exciting. The community benefits by having more people to play with and share in the experience of playing, and can benefit from more support for the game post-launch.
Regardless, with Randy Pitchford at the helm, it seems we can expect far more out of in-game advertisement than we'd ever thought possible.
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August 5th, 2008 at 10:06 am
[...] true to form — let you blow them to kingdom come. As a dedicated proponent of realistic, contextual in-game advertising, I was personally greatly pleased by the discovery, but soon wondered: how [...]
August 7th, 2008 at 5:01 am
[...] Has Massive considered vintage advertisements that reflect modern brands, like we’re seeing Double Fusion do with Brothers in Arms: Hell’s [...]
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