Ads in Videogames

Every couple of months there seems to be news about a company that wants to put ads into games. A lot of people are unsure about this, but I think it is a pretty interesting and cool idea.

This past weekend I popped Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas back into the PlayStation and started playing around. I had forgotten how much I liked the radio stations in that game, not only do they play good music (well, most of them do), but the fake ads that are in the game are hilarious.

I’m not saying that companies should put those kinds of ads in the game (after all, what company is going to pay to have a commercial that makes fun of them?), but slipping in a “This block of songs is brought to you by Coke!” now and then would be pretty cool and would make the game more “real” because, that’s what DJ’s do in real life.

More interesting I think would be to have ads on billboards in the game. There are already billboards all over the place, imagine if every 5th or 10th had a real ad in it? And what if the ads rotated through the city every few game-days? That would add a sense of a “living city” to the game play, which I think is a major component of the appeal of MMORPG’s. An example of this today is SSX: On Tour, which has several real-world product ads sprinkled in it.

Plus in this day and age of increasingly interconnected devices, I can see where a game company could offer to update the ads every few weeks/months via game updates. That would be really interesting to see, but I think it might not really happen. Most games are really really popular for the first few weeks or months after their release, but then they tend to drop off the gamer’s screens for various reasons. It would probably be hard to sell ad space on a game like GTA:SA when the next big game pops out.

A final note: I’m not saying all games should have ads. A game set in ancient Rome would not have billboards advertising the latest release from 50 Cent. That’s common sense. But a racing game set in a big city… That’s quite an opportunity.