Is City of Heroes in-game advertising missing its mark?

by Shawn Schuster on Jan 19th 2009 5:00PM

Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Business models, Culture, Economy, Events, in-game, MMO industry

When the whole in-game adverts debate started, there were people on both sides of the fence, understandably. Some gamers realize that development studios need alternative sources of revenue to create the games we enjoy, while others would rather remove their spleen with a spoon than ever see advertising in their favorite games.

Over at the Limited Edition blog, Welsh Troll takes the side for in-game adverts, and is literally begging for more in City of Heroes. As a European gamer, he tends to see less in-game adverts than is reported by the American CoH players, and wants to know why. He simply wants to help the development team out, and was hoping this would be the way to do it. Is the model not quite working as intended, or will it just take a bit longer for advertisers to latch on to something like this?

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Tags: adverts, city-of-heroes, coh, in-game-advertising, limited-edition

Reader Comments (3)

I have no inside knowledge ... but I predicted this, and I'll tell you why. When NCsoft first brought this up, those of us who've seen how horribly out-of-place in-game advertising looks in Anarchy Online brought that up, and NCsoft reassured us that their art department would have veto over all advertising images, and all advertising would have to fit in with the graphics of the game (for example, weathered billboards). And when they said that, I predicted that sales of advertising space would be so minimal that it wouldn't justify the development cost to put ad support into the code in the first place, because there is no way that almost any advertising agency's graphics department is going to give them the right to "deface" the graphics they design, and even if the agency went along with it, the client won't.

Moreover, the advertising business is hardly what it was even six months ago. The recent closure of EGM stands as testament to power of declining ad revenue, particularly in the gaming space.

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You know, I took a break from the game not long after the implemented the in-game advertising. At first there was just one ad showing up, some shoe ad that did look horribly out of place.

The ads had nothing to do with my leaving, I just needed a break from the game for a while. When I returned about 8 months later, I had been playing for a good 2 or 3 weeks and suddenly said to myself "Oh hey, what happened to the in-game ads?"

I haven't seen a single ad since I returned. And I checked my settings, I did not have the ads disabled. So I agree that this wasn't worth the development time to get the tech into the game to serve the ads. Especially considering how it angered a portion of the player base, some of whom actually quit the game over this issue.