Quake Wars will have in-game ads
"Go left at the Pepsi billboard, turn right at the Viagra ad and set the bombs. Now move it!"
Neil Postlethwaite, Managing Director for Splash Damage, came onto the ET:QW official community site yesterday to make the announcement. In order to bring not just basic bug patches but continuous refinements and improvements to what the company hopes will be a long-standing multiplayer experience, the developer has gone the route of IGA.
"For the last four years, we've put all of our effort into making Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars. So, we're not planning to ship this game and walk away. We want to keep supporting ETQW in as many ways as possible. We'll be maintaining the persistent stats servers and the community site, and continuing to support ETQW with updates and improvements," Neil said in his post.
In his comments, he also made sure to cover privacy concerns regarding the advertising. "The company providing the ad system does not and will not store any personal information or data that otherwise can be used to identify you. All they track is if and how long you look at the advertisements." Whether that will be enough to quell the privacy critics or not has yet to be seen, but at least the comments so far have been largely positive.
For anyone who will be toying around with the upcoming beta, you'll get the chance to see the ads in action - they have already been successfully included, so there aren't going to be a lot of surprises between the beta and final release.
In the meantime, take a step into our forums and shoot off a few rounds on Quake Wars, in-game ads, and the merging of the two.
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hundreds of thousands of dollars for EACH ad a company wants in the game PER COMPANY.
make the game 20 bucks with in game ads, and we will talk.
If they can do that, using real companies and making a profit, is what they'll be doing, why, so much the better.
http://xs.to
If it was set in todays time and the ads were current, then maybe (even though I don't support ANY advertisements for real products in games), if it was in a sports game where every inch is crawling with an ad, then fine because THATS real.
But putting in game ads, into games that are set in the future is like putting a pizza hut into the middle of WOW. It doesn't belong there. For example, the wars take place on some world way out of our soler system in the year 3000, Do you want to believe that Starbucks and Toyota have 1. Been around that long and 2. Relocated on some alien world?
From the moment you wake up, to the moment you lay yer head down, you are being subjected with ads.
PC games and the like, should be worlds onto there own, they should be a fantasy, and have very little tie with reality. After all, most play games to get away for awhile and do things they cant do in real life....agreed?
There's nothing like this in magazines, tv programs, out in public.
So why have it in games where people are only going to worry that it is spyware and invading their privacy?
Intriguing.
http://xs.to
Agree
I have yet to see any of the costs go down on any of the games with in game ads. The only time I see them go down, is when they dont sell well, or they are marked down because of how old they are. BF2142 at Best Buy is 30 bucks... still way to much for that buggy piece of software, and THAT had in game adds.....what happened there, where is my End User break on that?
"The company providing the ad system does not and will not store any personal information or data that otherwise can be used to identify you. All they track is if and how long you look at the advertisements."
Ok, so wait, its not going to store any personal data, but they are going to track how long I look at the advertisements? Ok, you have thousands of players playing on any server at a time, are you telling me nothing is stored for review and that you have someone watching EVERY player to see what they look at in real time? because in order to see who's looking at what ads and for how long, you need some type of IDENTIFICATION, and more so then not, its going to be MY PERSONAL IP address. That can be used to.... all together now... IDENTIFY ME...
If the end-user sees benefits from it then I'm not so bothered.
If the ad revenue just lines some fat-cat's pockets then I object.
you think Coke and the like wont be around in 50 years? ;)
in the end it all comes down to exactly how the ads are implemented
if they stick out and it looks **** then its bad
if they blend in with the environment then fine, great in fact
adds to the immersion factor and gets SD some extra cash, fine by me
"Earth 2060 you think Coke and the like wont be around in 50 years?" I'd like to think not, we are already seeing the death rattle of the Tobacco industry, and up till about 10 years ago the billboards were everywhere. So who's to say a name sake like Coke or Pepsi, or anything like that will last?
"RTFA, advertising revenue is supposed to be for server upkeep and to pay for continuing support" "SUPPOSED" being a key word.... have you played BF2142?
anyway i want it to be a little cheaper than a usual game, these ads will give far more money than it costs for servers and support.
and i wont like it if they fill my internet truck with spam that will go into the game and lag it to hell.
Last I checked coke doesn't cause cancer. unless you drink 10 liters a day but in that case I think you would deserve cancer to end your sad life. its like adding chlorine to the gene pool.
assuming they're created in such a way as to fit in with the environment, obviously shiny new billboards that look like they were put up yesterday dont fit in with a warzone being invaded by aliens
i havent played 2142, i played bf2 and based on that experience decided not to buy 2142 ;)
and EA are not SD :P
i have much more faith in SD getting ingame ads right than EA
I meant it as a example of the fall of a Advertising Giant. Who's to say that they wont find some health reason (in todays world, I wouldn't think there is not going to be someone bringing up Something about it, everyone so legal action happy) to bring about a change against sodas or really anything "unhealthy" for that matter.
Umm, up untill now the world has managed to pay for continued support (which I might add, in previous years was far superior for most games imo) for games out of the cash that we paid for the video games themselves. And why would we need server support? There are thousands of individuals willing to host public and clan servers.
The excuse that IGA is required for servers and continued support is totaly bull****. IGA is required for one purpose and one purpose alone, to increase profits at the expense of the users experience.
THANK YOU! (gives you a chocolate chip cookie and a gold star FTW)
You hit the nail right on the head. Thats the point I am trying to drive into some people..
When ever a company says something along the lines of "Its for the consumer" its a shark smile....
Also the server doesn't need to ID you to track how long an ad is being shown on someone's monitor, just count up cumulative seconds with no need for direct identification.
Hopefully it will be a similar situation to planetside where you can easily remove them.
persistant stats across all servers, requires infrastructure supported and maintained by SD
as for support on old games, maybe games are more expensive to make now? maybe they require more time and more expertise to support/patch/improve/update/whatever due to being far more complex?
im going to say it again, SD are not EA
much much much more faith in SD that they're a) telling the truth b) going to make a good game and c) not **** ;)
would i prefer no ads? yes of course
are properly done ads going to stop me buying QW? no, not at all
I will give you that, if there is an option to turn in game ads OFF, and its not a separate install program, then thats fine. As long as you give me the option to turn them off, and as for BF2142, it wanted to install a SEPARATE program to allow for the ads to be shown, yet no where on the box did it say that you had to or you couldn't play the game. So, when someone would open the package, and refuse to allow spyware to be installed on the system, they had a game they could not play, AND most stores will not allow you to fully return a opened game. And I know some people have found a way to turn off the ad server in BF2142 as well by blocking a certain IP range, so..I'm not sure whats going on with it now a days.
H.B.
That's pretty much the solution we used for planetside, the ads were sent via internet to allow for each country to have live updates with appropriate ads, so we just blocked the incoming ad stuff.
Even though I don't notice ads in games often, I hope there is an opt out option or something, but i'm not gonna hold off getting the game for one.
I'd think that cost would have been historically offset by the increase in people actually buying video games over the years.. so for instance, as the 80's progressed and more and more people started playing video games, yet game technology was steadily improving. Not sure how that would be different in this case.
anyone? :o
Generals has unified stats, i think renegade and RA2 do as well, yet none of them have ad's
In fact, there are usually a community willing to support the game when it becomes less popular (and as it becomes less popular, the demands on the server is less so its much more affordable for a small group to maintain it)
In game ad's are a load of tosh, if you want to give us in game ad's, lower the price, if you want to leave it ad free, the current price structure is right
They need to learn they cant have their cake and eat it
I know there was a big uproar about BF2142, but most people who really cared were able to block the ad's anyway, so EA didn't get anything out of including them (well unless they still got paid cos they couldn't work out that they were being blocked)
I see the same thing happening here, plus if your going to use in game ad's, what about the people actually hosting the servers, you know, the ones actually forking out a significant amount of money
- The toyota camry space cruiser with a 30% more efficient hover drive (Eutopic far futures).
- The toyota camry space tank with a 1 year armorment garantee (excluding RPG fire) (Dystopic far Futures)
- The Toyota camry Cart with adjustable horse rails (For medeival scenarios) - I don't see advertisers wanting to go backwards like that.
- The Toyota camry with 20% more efficient fuel cell (not-too-distant future)
- The Toyota Camry now with wireless AM radio (for not-too-distant past) again i don't see advertisers wanting to do that.
- Toyota Camry (Normal Ad for present day)
- Probably many more....
that's a lot of work and of course some games will have to be accomodated for say the advert says "Camry with 50% faster sheild regeneration" but the science in the game doesn't have sheilding or the entire game's world uses Credits but the adverts have £ or $ signsI don't mind it in games if it's in the background, obscure-like. Ideally, if the ads are meant to contribute to the ingame atmosphere, I reckon they should be fictional ones. I like that.
Adverts you can't help seeing are the ones that bother me.
(On a tangent: on the Lord of War DVD, there's a 30+ second Coke ad that you physically CANNOT skip. You can skip the legal stuff, the trailers, the warnings and the prelude Amnesty Int. thingy, but you CAN'T SKIP THE DAMN COKE ADVERT. That got on my tits. Felt too much like 1984.)
I'm a little annoyed that I had to pay £32.99 for the game and then get ads, and it has probably the worst support of any game I've played in the last 5 years :(
Though it is EA mind, and they are money grabbing b*stards...
I'm not too fussed as long as its not to obvious.
But this advertising, I think, did not talk back to a master server...
If you're against IGA, don't buy the game. Vote with your wallet; it's that simple.
And even then, loads of normal users probably don't know/care, and their the ones who contribute the most money to games
Here's how R6: Vegas did it:
Every single vehicle in the game is a dodge. Every car on the street, every car on display in the casinos, every car on a billboard and every car on every arcade machine was a dodge calibur racing game or some crap.
Every billboard in the game is for Axe body spray. One level actually starts off by fading in the scene which has you in a helicopter staring at 3 gigantic Axe body spray billboards.
I was completely disgusted, and couldn't even finish the game even though I DOWNLOADED it. I had to uninstall it and remove it completely from my computer.
Maybe if all those adverts weren't in it in that fashion I would have bought the game, too...