Sony Could Interrupt Your Games With Ads
- Thread starter Karloff
- Start date
ahahahahaha!
i can imagine those guys at sony, sitting in comfy chairs and petting their cats while twirling their mustaches.
come on! thats the kind of bs you expect from "dr. doom and his army of angry PR minions" because how the hell do you expect people to react?
see, i have this way of deciding whenever something is acceptable or not.
you have the right to complain according to how much you have paid. you paid nothing - you dont complain. you paid something - you can complain. if they release free games - fine, go ahead!
is still stupid as all hells and plainly wrong, but you get what you pay for.
but yeah, as a member of the "glorious pc master race" i laugh at you puny console users. but i also feel sad for you. its a strange emotion, believe me.
i can imagine those guys at sony, sitting in comfy chairs and petting their cats while twirling their mustaches.
come on! thats the kind of bs you expect from "dr. doom and his army of angry PR minions" because how the hell do you expect people to react?
see, i have this way of deciding whenever something is acceptable or not.
you have the right to complain according to how much you have paid. you paid nothing - you dont complain. you paid something - you can complain. if they release free games - fine, go ahead!
is still stupid as all hells and plainly wrong, but you get what you pay for.
but yeah, as a member of the "glorious pc master race" i laugh at you puny console users. but i also feel sad for you. its a strange emotion, believe me.
You know what is great about Sony patenting this "brilliant idea" is it means THEY WILL BE THE ONLY COMPANY THAT DOES THIS!!!
Normally patented features are held by one entity to make their product more desirable, instead the mere existence of this patent makes EVERY SONY PRODUCT worth less as that is the ONLY company that would roll out this feature at any time.
Think about it, if you want a sure fire way to avoid this diabolically shillish money gouge, you just have to avoid Sony.
Normally patented features are held by one entity to make their product more desirable, instead the mere existence of this patent makes EVERY SONY PRODUCT worth less as that is the ONLY company that would roll out this feature at any time.
Think about it, if you want a sure fire way to avoid this diabolically shillish money gouge, you just have to avoid Sony.
No, it just means that anyone else who wants to will have to pay a licensing fee.Treblaine said:
I dunno, the funniest part of this thread for me is how many people are just assuming it's going to happen to every game, or be some built-in feature on the PS4. While big corporations are occasionally capable of some serious blind spots, it's seriously unlikely that they'd ever let something like this get past the testing phase without realizing it's going to piss off 90% of their core demographic, if they apply the technique to actual paid-for games.
For free games, it offers them a way to expand their library without losing significant amounts of money, and that's honestly what I expect to see it in.
But apparently the average poster here assumes the sky is falling when they feel that first drop of rain...
And really, how would you know its actually a loading screen?Crono1973 said:
It will just look like a loading screen so that they can advertise, and it will last longer than they ever did before.
This is terrible even for free games.Raesvelg said:
There is a good and proven way of making money off of games that are free-to-play or "free to start playing".
You know why Google is such an incredibly valuable company? Because they have an effective advertising strategy yet if you'd ever use google you are not bombarded with popups and interruptions. No. They are RIGHT to focus on advertising as they are in a position to comprehensively understand each one of their users, even from a single search or from a patter of their searches. So the small text-only ads that go with the searches are SO VALUABLE.
But someone playing a game, you cannot infer their tastes.
In google, if someone searches for "Avengers" then the local cinema puts an advertisement for THEIR LOCAL cinema with a special offer and booking, that HUGELY increases sales. Because they were interested in the "avengers" and google puts their ad RIGHT THERE.
Products and services are so broad and diverse the old scattergun approach of advertising is impossible now. Guys have to sit through ads for women's makeup, Muslims have to sit through beer adverts, teenagers have to sit through mortgage or house insurance adverts. Targeted advertising is where the money is and Sony can't do that here. They cannot convince people to honestly fill out their vital statistics and true wants and desires, but google CAN determine that from what they search for.
If you are to make money off people playing free games you can only confidently confer one thing: they like to play this game.
You don't know their gender, age, religion (if any), politics, you don't know ANYTHING of their other interests apart from they like this game enough to play it. And THAT is what you sell them, you sell them more of the game they are playing. Like TF2's mann-co store selling hats and weapon variables to be unlocked earlier (that don't unbalance the game). They would sell an unbalancing weapon, but that would drive away the customers who are the free-to-players. You have to sell them things that makes their experience playing the game better but doesn't impede the new and existing customers who didn't by what they bought.
Un-targeted advertisements are derided because they know that odds are the product they are trying to sell will be of no appeal to most users, they only work by being as obnoxious and hard-selling as possible to the few people they relate to.
This is why the free to play model is making way more money than ad-funded model.
But then there is the very WAY that Sony intends to deliver these ads that aren't particularly targeted right in the middle of gameplay, utterly destroying the pacing and mood. The worst part of this is it doesn't outline any ability to auto-pause the game, you are FORCED to watch a shitty irrelevant advert only to WAIT FOR IT TO END! Because if you aren't ready when it ends you die. This is terrible for even a free game. This is also impossible to implement with a multiplayer game, you can't just freeze a character - even if invulnerable - mid game.
Games are not a TV-experience. They are a movie experience. No movie stops randomly to sell you something. There might be product placement but that's just something in there, it doesn't stop the presentation.
It's still a terrible idea. What gamer is going to tolerate an ad jumping up and lobbing them out of the experience, utterly shattering their immersion?
I could understand on a loading screen, but not mid game.
If you try this crap, Sony, prepare not to sell anything to anyone ever again.
I could understand on a loading screen, but not mid game.
If you try this crap, Sony, prepare not to sell anything to anyone ever again.
Well that was... wordy.Treblaine said:
And largely irrelevant; the model Sony is busy attempting to patent is functionally the same as the one that currently dominates the marketplace for free games in the smartphone universe. It's intended to be annoying, not annoying by accident; they get a minor amount of money selling ad space on their games, and more if you actually buy it.
For free games? It's a perfectly valid concept; Player gets to try the game out for free, and can either put up with it or actually purchase the game to make the ads go away.
Think of it as ad-funded demos. Rather like this site has ad-funded Captchas, and NO, General Motors, I will NOT be buying the all-new Chevy Sonic.
Yep. I really can't believe that so many people are looking for justifications to make this "ok".FoolKiller said:
- Well, if it's for free games then it's ok.
- Well, if it's for a free console it's ok
- Well, if it's only during loading screens, it's ok.
- Well, if it's only in-game advertising, it's ok.
No, it's not ok because once the advertising gets accepted, it will only grow and eventually it will be just as bad as TV. People need to remember that marketers will push as many ads as people will tolerate. A marketer will never say "that's too many ads".
Well I was on the fence about buying the next PS console. If sony does this I won't spend my hard earned money on it.
I'm sorry, but how is this a good idea? I think Rainbow 6 had the best method: when you went online, there were billboards that turned into paid advertisement. And that was fine! I actually liked it!
This will fail. This will fail epically.
This will fail. This will fail epically.
How is it a good idea to say "I like billboard ads" and then say this isn't a good idea. The only message they are hearing is that you like the ads that are already there and they reason that you would tolerate more ads.katana-409 said:
Then it's not a free game.Raesvelg said:
If the objective is to be bad enough that people want to upgrade from the free trial version to the full version you have to pay for, then just limit access. It is NOT WHAT SMARTPHONE APP MARKET DOES to deliberately ad annoying adverts, what they do is limit features. So a trial version of a spreadsheet app would have a limited number of pages or no upload-sync feature, not blatantly architect an interruption. That is insulting that makes people not want to give them any money.
I have explained why it is not a valid concept for free games, your statement "just buy the game" clearly shows you haven't read what I wrote. So why bother replying to my post if you did not read my post?
I have made VERY CLEAR that free-to-play games cannot succeed if they screw around with their free-players, that will cause them to just leave and go to the preponderance of Free-to-Play games that don't fuck around with their users: like Team Fortress 2, Tribes Ascend and League of Legends, who are RAKING IN THE CASH! Ad funded free-games are NOT!
Think of it this way: A demo is a demo.
Do you know what the word "demo" comes from? It comes from "demonstration". A demo gives you a whole unadulterated section of a gameplay, not the whole game adulterated with stuff that (1) doesn't make the publishers much money from how un-targeted the ads are, and (2) hugely piss off the demo player to the extent they don't want anything to do with the product. A demonstration shows how a product works but you don't get to use it all.
Demos don't even need to be ad funded. THE DEMO ITSELF IS AN ADVERTISEMENT! It is advertising the WHOLE GAME! It is targeted advertisement as they wouldn't seek out the demo and keep playing it if they didn't like it. Then at the end you ideally make a direct sale, a special offer like 10% off or the opportunity to immediately continue on from where you have progressed in the demo (that is usually the first level).
Demos don't need to screw us around trying to sell two things at once: one the whole game, and the other ad-space for generic commodities.
PS: Ad-funded captchas fail because they depend on you ALREADY knowing (from other adverts) what they are selling. Like Johnsons Farm the question is "words associated with this". I've never heard of Johnsons Farm before, I don't know what they sell and I don't care to find out. If it was "Words associated with Coca Cola" I only know what Coca Cola is FROM OTHER ADVERTISING! Yes, even the branding on Coca Cola in shops is part of advertising. So these ad captchas don't sell anything. They just show a brand name with no associated values or reason for me to give a crap. I'm pretty sure its less about advertising and more about a more robust anti-bot system or possibly distributed market research.