Business & Games: The Blog

I was looking for a report on the Electric Sheep’s baseball simulcast and found something on YouTube. A large-screen QuickTime version is here. Some information on 3pointD, and some - on ESC’s blog.

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You’ve probably heard about Massive launching interactive ads for Toyota in Anarchy Online (if not, here’s a report by Business Week). This paper on Fully Interactive Surfaces in Doom 3 explores a more advanced kind of interactivity — the authors have embedded the original Doom into the game released a decade later. I wonder if we will soon start seeing advergames inside larger titles.

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Coming out August 1. Follow its progress on the magazine’s website. A few more details at SL Insider.

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Adotas does Q&A sessions with the execs from Massive, IGA and Double Fusion. The questions:

1. Has the industry grown large enough that you could consider other in-game advertising companies as serious competition, or is it still a wide open market?

2. In what direction is the in-game ad formats heading: display ads like on billboards, or in-game product placement?

3. Is there an industry standard for measuring in-game ads?

4. How useful do you think in-game metrics are, since games can be played both on and off-line on a whole bunch of different platforms?

5. What sort of games are more easily combined with advertising? What do you do for games that aren’t sports or set in a present-day location? What about fantasy, sci fi games, or even puzzle, arcade, and casual titles?

6. Do you think it’s possible in the future that some high-profile games could be entirely ad-supported?

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I am doing the thesis’s last chapter that focuses on ad formats in video games and hit that part about voice advertising. You know, where a character says “I wish I had a ride like that” and points to GMS Yukon in the latest CSI game. I also remember hearing about Madden doing product plugs in his commentary to the NFL series, but don’t have much more than that.

If you know of any other examples, could you please drop me a line (vedrashko at hotmail) or comment below? Any tips or links will be much appreciated, and you will get an honorable mention in the paper. Oh, and I am already writing about fake radio commercials in GTA: San Andreas, so that’s covered.

To make this post worth your time, here’s a chapter from Game Design Complete published on Gamasutra (free registration) that talks about various kinds of game advertising opportunities. Also, check out my del.icio.us bookmarks on the subject; plenty of goodies there that haven’t been posted here.

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Here’s a McDonald’s map for Counter-Strike: Source. I also have a McD WAD for Doom but the game isn’t stable enough for me to take a snapshot. I suspect none of this was sanctioned by Ronald, but that’s the beauty of it.

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Seems like a long time ago now, but about a week ago I received word from Paul Hemp, senior editor at the Harvard Business Review, informing me of a virtual discussion scheduled to take place inside Second Life. Some of you might recall Mr. Hemp’s recent article, “Avatar-Based Marketing”, about which I posted last month (reLink). Anyway, I made some time to attend and at least several other bloggers have since covered the discussion - most notably Ilya Vedrashko over on the MIT Advertising Lab/Brands in Games blogs (Link), and Wagner James Au over on the New World Notes blog (Link).

Continue reading "Last Word on “Avatar-Based Marketing”" »

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