Duders!

A friend of mine is working on feature on in-game advertisement. It's for a school project and we want to have a couple of examples on good and bad advertising in video-games. So please share your favourite and least favourite in-game ads.

Thank you!

Do you mean ads for fake in-game stuff, like this:

or do you mean in-game ads for real life stuff, like the Best Buy ads on big highway signs in Need for Speed?

In-Game Ads for real stuff.

Burnout Paradise did a good job with in-game advertising. But the best job in my Opinion does the Yakuza series. They also make a ton of money with exclusive deals of having real life products in their game. Overall you can say that it fits the best if the world is realistic and set in our time. Like GTAV for example would be a great game to put these adverts and brands in it.

I think there's only bad examples.

Anyway, here's one.

iPod in Metal Gear Solid 4. Never played it, but I remember that generated some discussion at the time.

Oh god fucking dammit I had totally forgotten about this. An absolutely incredible Quick Look moment.

Edit: it's about 4 minutes in if anyone wants to relive the magic dubbed by Jeff as the "worst thing I have ever seen".

I don't know, I thought the product placement in Pikmin was kind of funny (at least in a "wait, what the hell?" sort of way).

It seems pretty obvious, but sports games generally do a pretty good job with their in game ads. They integrate them in similarly to how real sports shows would, which I would say actually adds to the experience, instead of detracting from it like the ads do in many other types of games, since it makes you feel more like you're watching a sports broadcast.

I thought Burnout Paradise having ads on the billboards in game was pretty neat and inoffensive.

The kind of over-the-top obnoxious ads that are common in mobile games are easily the worst. I tend to switch between free to play grinding games - yeah, I consider that a genre in itself - from time to time because they for some reason appeal to me, what with needing no more than 5 minutes of time a day and allowing you to build something up over the course of a few weeks. Right now I'm playing something called "Rivals at War" that is one of the worst offenders in this department I've ever seen: it's basically a management game that without warning has a tendency to flash full screen ads for other mobile games when you're navigating the menus. Closing the ads causes the game to reboot. Yeah, really. It doesn't hurt your progression (like I said, you're just navigating a menu) but it is beyond irritating. It has another interesting solution too: you can choose to watch 30 second commercial clips for some in-game cash. Which I do a lot, but I simply start the videos and do something else in the meantime so I doubt it's particularly effective. So why do I put up with it? Free to play. More on that a bit further down in the post.

Personally I'm not a fan of advertising in games full stop. I'm not as averse to them as some people, for instance I really don't mind the advertisements on Xbox Live, but I'm not even a little bit interested in what they advertise and most of time just filter them out mentally. So you could say I'm tolerant of them, but since they rarely add anything I would rather not see them all.

But for a positive example, hmm... I think I'll have to approach it from a market standpoint. I haven't played Sim City 3, but I read some about their Nissan cooperation. It basically works like this: Nissan offers player's a free DLC download of a Nissan Leaf recharging station and adds Nissan Leaf cars to the city. The station itself gives the player a few bonuses, it apparently increases neighborhood happiness.

This is actually an excellent way of doing in game-promotions for the advertiser: since you give the gamer something in return (a free bonus item) you get their attention. Since you get them to do something with the advertisement; in this case integrating it in their city, you get involvement that means that they are far more likely to remember it. You know the saying: "Tell me and I will forget, Show me and I will remember, Involve me and I will understand."

In the end, the truth of the matter is that advertisement rarely add something positive for the consumer since it is about making them spend money on something they have no intention of spending money on. Sure you could argue that it's about making them aware of a product they might want to spend money on, in a sense doing them a service, but that's never really the intention.

Most of the time the only benefit advertisements add to the player is a lower price - that's the reason I tolerate even the most obnoxious of ads in my free to play games. Without them they wouldn't be free. This is something you should keep in mind for the feature: the more the customer payed for the product, the less tolerant they will be of ads. It is also why some gamers reacted highly negatively to the Nissan commercial: they felt that when they payed full price for what is supposed to be a AAA product, any kind of advertisement, even as optional extras, comes off as a patronizing money grab, or in the words of a comment on the linked Sim City 3 article:

Goddamnit Maxis, I bought the game for $60. Following your link for the free leaf station I realize I'm playing a stripped down version of Simcity considering the DLC content I'm not gonna pay for. I'm a true fan, I deserve better treatment.

Consider 1 month since release.... microtransactions already?

thermalmotion

Another type of ads in the same vein that might be considered positive are the bundled extras that come with some pre-orders - like the Doctor Pepper pre-order promotion for Battlefield 3 that added a few cosmetic dog tags to the game. It comes at no real cost to the consumer and can therefore be considered a freebee and at least involves the player somewhat in the advertisement, if not to the extent that was done with the Leaf station.

So I guess that pretty much sums it up for me.

Yo, take me to the Pizza Hut!

If you count visual novels, there's Steins;Gate.

Though I don't know if there's an actual sponsorship going on. I think in the anime the bottles say Dk Pepper though the characters say 'Doctor Pepper'. Still

I think examples of good advertising are hard to recognize because they're unobtrusive and natural feeling. It's the terrible ads that stick out in our memory because of their offensiveness.

That said, El Shaddai had some deal with Diesel jeans that was pardoxically the hokiest/best thing to be in a video game about the Bible.

@getz said:

God, I forgot about that.

See what I did there?

That game had a bunch of real world stuff in it. Mac computers, licensed energy drinks (Japanese ones), Sony cellphones, and probably some other stuff.

But Japanese Peace Walker had Doritos and Mountain Dew in it as items. They removed the marketing from the US version though, which I don't understand at all.

Alan Wake did in-game ads well, in my opinion. Very unobtrusive.

I think I was literally offended by the Subway multiplayer advertizements in Uncharted 3. It was so forced and unfitting... Thank god they removed them.

As far as product placement is concerned, an argument could be made for a large number of shooters that include painstaking re-creations of real-world guns.

I think it works completely fine in racing games when its just a billboard ad or maybe a store on the street you pass by in a matter of seconds.

When it is in FPS games plastered on walls like a poster, then it is really annoying.

I kind of enjoy fake ads in games though no matter the genre. Seeing what stupid fake Coca Cola name they came up with is always entertaining.