In-game advertising

[racofer]

But the truth... oh god, the truth is so much worse... so, so much worse...

Spoiler

 

[Modron]

This thread aged badly. How could I have known back then that "ads in games" would become a reality, but in a much much different way than I imagined?

My idea was billboards in something like a GTA game showing real world ads, because that makes sense. Big cities have billboards with ads on them. A game set in a modern real world city can have real companies pay money to be featured on in-game billboards. Simple. Easy. Doesn't hurt the game.

But the truth... oh god, the truth is so much worse... so, so much worse...

2 years before this thread:

 

[Tavernking]

Adverts would be pretty cool, imagine opening your inventory and seeing 'sponsored by X', I could see it working in some non-serious games. I forget the name but there was some kind of easy to add advertising API for flash games back in the day, it made indies way more money than they were getting from sponsorships from websites or shared ad revenue from said websites. If it makes it indie development more financially viable then I'd be all down for it.

 

[Bad Sector]

I think you refer to mochiads which was highly popular at the time but I think it depended on the game - personally i made more money from non-exclusive sponsorships (essentially letting a site to host my game with their name and no ads) than in-game ads. Though i only had ads during the initial downloading time where you'd have to wait anyway, after that there were no ads.

Also all the ads i saw in the games via mochiads were about Cilit Bang and stuff like that that i have no idea how it'd work with the ~12yo audience that played these games at the time and there was no option in mochiads to tell them that "some dude playing a bloody zombie FPS or turn based fantazy puzzle game in their highschool computer room has very little chance on being interested in toilet cleaning products".

I did make enough money to buy VtMB though so there is that.