Hellgate Beta's In-Game Ads Raise Eyebrows 424
ari wins writes "IGN.com has up a post discussing the new EA/Flagship game Hellgate: London, and the in-game advertisements it includes to facilitate targeted marketing. Though ads in games aren't exactly new, some Beta testers are objecting to their apparently off-putting presence. Users have also noted that accepting the game's EULA means you submit to the collection of 'technical and related information that identifies your computer, including without limitation your Internet Protocol address, operating system, application software and peripheral hardware'."
This CAN be stopped (Score:5, Interesting)
Buy it, wait a week or so, and return it. Then buy it somewhere else, wait a week or so, and return it. If just 5000 people were to do this 5 times each, it could destroy the percieved marketability, and it would be attributed to targeting issue. Enough people wasting enough time of enough computer stores, and computer stores would be best off not carrying it.
Then the investors / decision makers who committed to this sickness get discliplined / lose money, and new investors get scared to do this again.
Demo or Beta? (Score:3, Interesting)
This information on the box? (Score:5, Interesting)
Second question: Anyone know how much this kind of live uploading of advertisements would affect online performance?
wtf (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This CAN be stopped (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:wtf (Score:5, Interesting)
So now we have to pay full price to buy it, pay each month AND get invasive ads?
Re:wtf (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unobtrusive (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, Hellgate London demo was a real yawner. Very disappointing. Unplayably buggy in the gameplay department (everything else ran smoothly though) - I literally reached a dead end along the linear path that I had to take to get to the next zone and complete the main questline, which I assume upon completion the demo would end. Went back, and could find no alternative path through either of the last two areas on the path.
Cursor tracking (Score:3, Interesting)
Two Words (Score:3, Interesting)
Electronic Arts.
Yet another reason why I hope they will die a fiery death. I haven't bought an EA game since they bought/shut down GameStorm [wikipedia.org] because "gasp" it competed with "Ultima Online".
Re:Unobtrusive (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the demo, they really messed up. The beta is less buggy (although still has a couple kinks to work out). They just shouldn't have released the demo at all to be honest.
Re:This CAN be stopped (Score:4, Interesting)
It's still our world, he's just thinking its the late 80's or early 90's when the stores did this.
He speaks truly. I worked at a mall-based EB back around '88. Back at that time, EB also sold computers, mainly AST and Amstrad brands. We had a shrink-wrap setup in the back, and the policy at the time was to LET customers "try" the software on our demo PCs.
If they saw what they liked, they bought the game and all was well. If not, we took it to the back, and rewrapped and repriced it. Thinking back, I'm not sure if such was legal; if the game has been installed, even on a demo PC, it's not "new", is it? IANAL, so I couldn't tell you...
So yes, Virginia, there WAS a Santa Claus... Now all you get to demo is console games, unless you go to a gaming cybercafe.
Ads in game are a good thing! (Score:4, Interesting)
There actually are some pretty good reasons to put ads in games. In fact, having ads in games (to a point) can be a win/win for both the software company, which gets more money, and the user, who gets more realism. For instance, if you play a game in a city setting, one would expect realistic ads on billboards, bulletin boards, walls, etc (as opposed to crappy old games where you would race cars through a city, for instance, and every billboard would say "Midway!", which got old really quick). And speaking of racing games, what kind of a NASCAR game would you have if there weren't ads plastered all over the cars? I think having ads in a game is great for realism and cost defrayment (maybe you don't need as many people to buy a game for developers to be willing to make it, since they will also get ad money). As long as they put the ads in context within the game, this is a great thing.
Now, I should say I haven't seen this beta so I don't know if they are crossing the line and putting ads out of context. If every third person in a crowd is wearing an NVIDIA shirt, that is out of context and pretty ridiculous. Also, if performance suffers from downloading new ads for the game or something, that is bad too. But if performance doesn't suffer, downloading new ads could be good. After all, billboards, walls, etc change their ads in real life, so why shouldn't a game? That ads realism and variety to the landscape.
Re:This information on the box? (Score:1, Interesting)
Having played the beta for the past week, logging in around 15 hours of play time, I first noticed an advertisement on a subway wall. It looked to be a part of the game world, had a picture with a caption that read, "Book Four coming soon." I wasn't sure at the time if it was a part of the game or an actual advertisement, I mean, I couldn't exactly make out what the picture was supposed to be (even with textures on Very High), but it looked like standard comic book art in dark, muted colors.
The advertisements are standard textures, represented in the game as poster-sized billboards in the subway stations. They're about the size that a poster would be and aren't annoying or even noticeable.
TFA seems a bit sensationalist in how they used the term Adware--as if it's installing an extra program along with the game onto your computer, or there's pop-up windows while you play, or there'll be a giant, flashing, updating advertisement on the screen, etc.--to describe a static texture placed in an area whose real world counterpart is also, filled with advertisements.
That said, I'll have to take a second look and see if I can find any that are annoying.
It's on par with, but still eleven billion times less annoying than the BRODOORODODODODOoo "NVidiaaaaaaaaaa," ads that play when you start up just about any EA or many other publishers' games, at least.
Of course Hellgate will have one of those, too.
It's the "EULA" (Score:3, Interesting)
I do not know about game-specific retailers per se, but not one major software retailer in the United States (CompUSA, etc.) will give refunds for opened software. The software companies themselves encouraged that policy "to fight piracy". So statements in shrink-wrap EULAs to the effect that if you don't like the terms you should just return the product are misleading at best. If I were a judge, I would call it outright "fraud" because the software companies are well aware of that situation... they created it!
Re:This CAN be stopped (Score:5, Interesting)
and to be quite honest after playing the demo, there was really no reason to buy the game. Its not groundbreaking in any way, and I couldn't help but feel bored while playing the demo.
Re:This CAN be stopped (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as everyone remembers that my shade of gray is better than their shade of gray, everything will be ok though.
Re:Ads in a game you pay for=Stealing (Score:3, Interesting)
That's actually not true. Most people don't remember then but when cable first came out to the masses, 90% of the selling point is that you would ONLY get commercials on network broadcast channels. Once they had their foot in the door in most markets, commercials changed over night. Since then, it has been the same old story; lie, lie, lie, raise prices again, just like everyone other monopoly/utility. I seem to recall cable being commercial free for only a year or two, after that they placed commercials like crazy and their prices doubled over the next eight years. This was in the Houston market. Keep in mind, they were profitable when before they had commercials and while they were still rolling out cable in large areas. Think about that for second.
These days people pay inflated prices for channels because we are floating 100-channels no one watches or wants because they are force bundled. In other words, they could drop commercials and stop bundling and prices could stay the same. Some estimates I've read suggest cable company prices could be cut in half and they would still be wildly profitable. Remember, sat TV is only profitable because cable profits are so insanely, unreasonable high. Think about it for a second, you really think the cost of using cable laid over the last 30 years is anything near the cost of launching and maintaining sats in orbit while maintaining a market the fraction the size cable? To boot, sat is often cheaper than cable in many markets while their per install overhead is much, much higher than cable. If that doesn't tell you how insanely over priced cable is, you'll never gasp it.
The version, as you tell it, is what the cable companies preach and it has been fairly well debunked.
Do "elite" accounts have ads? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This CAN be stopped (Score:5, Interesting)
Best Buy tried to stop me from returning a game by saying it was a violation of copyright law, so I acquired a copy of the most recent revision and brought it in with me. The manager realized that fucking with a customer who knows that the law is on their side is a BAD idea (at least in the state of Massachusetts) and my game was returned for a full refund.
Re:This CAN be stopped (Score:3, Interesting)
Created a survey to answer question .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Click Here to take survey [surveymonkey.com]
Re:Marketing Has Succeeded (Score:4, Interesting)
Fighting the demonic hordes is cool. Fighting the demonic hordes in a futuristic setting is cooler. Fighting the demonic hordes in a futuristic setting in my home town is about as cool as it can get. (Although note that I've not played the game yet, it could well suck)
when your game is about demons from hell invading London thirty years in the future, being realistic goes straight out the window
Just because the premise is unrealistic, doesn't mean that the setting has to be. Believe me, the Tube is *covered* with adverts - some stations now even have LCD screens with moving ads playing (thankfully no sound as yet...). Not having adverts in the game would be jarring for those of us who actually use the Tube (or I guess any similar train system) on a daily basis. Kind of like when it rains in Oblivion and the rain goes straight through archways, etc. It's a little thing, but it spoils the realism a bit.