Breaking Point

We all feel by now as if "in-game ad" is a bad word, and in a way, it is. Advertising is message (remember the message?) whereas a game ought to be, perhaps, a neutral entity onto which we can transpose ourselves -- either that, or an experience carefully crafted wholly for the emotions. As Jon Blow said in the article we discussed yesterday, it seems part of the objective of a game should be "setting a mood and a feeling, and you can't do it while there's like, a Burger King ad there, flashing."

But development costs are getting very, very high. Like, $10 million-per-major-project high, and if you're not one of the big guns, it's going to bust you open. Unfortunately, Midway today laid off between 90 and 130 dev staff at its Austin studio over a project it canceled that hadn't even been announced yet, case in point.

Also today, at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, as if speaking a curse, former Sony Europe boss and current Codemasters chair Chris Deering cited that same million-dollar decahedron as unsustainable, predicting the squeeze on software developers is about to get worse. According to Deering, we live in an era where only 3 games out of 10 break even, and global software sales and console attach rates are expected to plummet even as hardware install bases jump.

So while the knee-jerk reaction to the in-game ad biz is to roll our eyes at the latest flagrant nickel-and-dime effort, to protest the way a nebulous black-suited they are whoring our medium, it's also necessary, after a point, to empathize somewhat with the industry for seeking the cringe-inducing "alternative revenue stream." Yes, yes, they make a lot of money, but they lose a lot, too, and then people get fired. Midway's also paying $1.2 million in severance to those who've been laid off, by the way, so hopefully those guys land on their feet.

And really, in-game advertising doesn't interfere too much as we know it these days -- there are ads on just about every website you read, so what's one more on some loading screen someplace? And even though "enhances realism" sounds like a line the dreaded ad agencies are fond of hauling out to defend the dreaded, dreaded "nickel-and-dime effort," would you rather your soccer star wear Adidas shoes or "Abibas?" What makes more sense on your Burnout track, a billboard for energy fuel or an art asset carefully crafted to look like one?

However, in addition to budgets straining, we've got other media, like the film industry, looking at our big figures to see how they can get in. (The music industry wants more money to license songs to rock games, by the way). And now we've got an ad for Paramount's upcoming 'Tropic Thunder' hitting Ubisoft's Rainbow 6 Vegas 2. Okay, not so unusual.

What is unusual is that the ad itself is part of the game. It's a sidequest, incorporated into the game design not wholly by Massive, Microsoft's own in-game agency, and not by Paramount, either. Ubisoft spearheaded the game-design-as-ad-design, and now when you play R6 Vegas, you can go on a scavenger hunt in the game to piece together 'Tropic Thunder'-branded clues. Your incentive is that you receive a mobile text code once you've completed the mission, which you can dial in to be entered in a drawing for various Xbox 360-related prizes.

I'm surprised that I saw virtually no reaction to this in the blogosphere -- I suppose that, just as we tune out advertising (or try to) in games as any other media, we also tune out news, announcements and commentary from in-game ad agencies. Or we willfully ignore them because they're traditionally the bad guys, perhaps? But this 'Tropic Thunder' announcement (and maybe we just want to pretend 'Tropic Thunder' does not exist) represents an entirely new and far more aggressive frontier in in-game advertising than we've seen anywhere to date.

We're talking about a first-person shooter here, not sports branding to "enhance realism" for sports games, or clothing brands in online worlds where the goal is to flaunt your "personal style" on an avatar. I talked to Massive's global sales VP Jay Samson this week at Gamasutra, and he told me that the specific design principles of FPS games -- they require you to roam the entire environment, to look around you regularly, and examine unusual environmental objects closely -- lend themselves perfectly to this sort of ad campaign.

This isn't art assets or background texture; it's literally in the design, it is using the core of the design to advertise to you, and the game's designers themselves (were instructed to) build it in.

Obviously, the industry environment does not make this an easy issue with a clear solution; a hard-line right or wrong is not likely to surface easily. It's simply worth noting that desperate circumstances are leading to ever more aggressive counter-measures -- where's the breaking point?

[Header pic, like yesterday, is more from Braid artist David Hellman, just 'cuz it's awesome.]