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Ad Crazy

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by jhilgeman2

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I respect the costs of developing and distributing software, and I pay for the games and applications that I use.

The other night, my wife and I were running around, shooting terrorists in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the Xbox 360, when I noticed a HUGE advertisement on one of the walls in the game for the upcoming movie, "Tropic Thunder." Six things occurred to me:

1. I never consented to anything to allow the game to downloaded advertisements.
2. By not asking me, that download also "stole" some of my bandwidth.
3. The advertisements are highly targeted and would probably result in a good response from the average gamer playing this type of game.
4. The advertisements are in several locations throughout the game, and they would get a LOT of impressions due to the nature of movement in the game (ducking behind cover, coming out again, etc)
5. Ubisoft (the game maker), must be making LOTS of money off of selling these types of advertisements.
6. I paid full, normal price for this game.

I feel cheated. It's one thing to allow advertisements to be shown in exchange for a lower price (I've done this in the past with some apps), but it's another to pay FULL price for a new game and then the manufacturer begins making money off of marketing to me using MY bandwidth (without my consent) to offset THEIR costs even more. Am I not paying for their costs already by paying $50 or $60 for a game? It's not like Xbox 360 game piracy is out of control and causing huge profit losses, so why aren't these games $20 or $30 when they first come out? I'd still be willing to pay that and knowingly receive advertisements.

Then there's the bandwidth issue. Luckily, most of us in the U.S. have unlimited bandwidth (transfer) and only have to pay for the speed we want. But I know several places in the world where people have Xbox 360s and they still pay for the amount of data transferred each month. To not ask them if they want to download advertisements when connected to the internet - is that not stealing from these people? Or does Microsoft and Ubisoft just expect that they will disconnect their net connection prior to playing each time (I'm not even 100% sure the ads are downloaded while playing)?

I wonder if there would be more outrage if this type of thing happened in the business community. You load up Outlook, and the splash screen has an ad below it for the latest Motorola phone.

3 replies

by charliespencer

How do you know the ad was downloaded and not coded directly into the game? Do the ads change?

The rest of your comments are dead on, especially about the price as compared to other similar games that don't include advertising content.

by tink!

And I agree with the original post too. If new targeted ads are going to be continually downloaded, then yes, there should be a choice to have them do so, and there should also be an offset in cost.

Advertising is getting all too much freedom these days. They're getting more audience without having to give back anything further to the consumer. Every now and then I can't help but consciously note a blatant product placement in a new movie. And yet movie costs continue to rise.

I wonder how much the gaming companies would respond to the original poster's (sorry forgot the name already) complaint if a large number of gamers made the same point. I'm sure they'd come back at first trying to say that the ads use a "negligible amount" of bandwith. But still - it goes along the lines of the original Netzero accounts - where you could choose to use the service free - but with advertisements. The consumer should have the choice.

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