Backtracking Like Sonic in Reverse

I could just make this a little note at the bottom of the last entry, but I think it's important enough to make a separate post. Plus, you get an editorial on my own editorial comments.

I won't for a single second say what Zynga or literally every single other video game company is doing -- throwing in ads in the middle of your video gaming experience -- is wrong. After all, you've seen ads for in-world products placed into games throughout the existence of the medium. While many game designers have used such space to add creative flare (Nuka Cola, for example) to their "game-only" products, sometimes you gots ta get paid, ya dig?

The issue here is that the products are free, or certainly close to it (in case math is hard, $0.99 is roughly 1/60 of $60 required for your average new video game), so a manufacturer needs to make money from somewhere to monetize their product and offset the expenses of labor, time, and all that other fun stuff. After all, love of video games and fun is a beautiful thing, but it won't keep you fed. Unless you eat game cartridges, I guess.

"But what about those Mountain Dew ads I skate past in Tony Hawk's Whateverathon 18 in the game I did pay $60 for?," you may not actually ever say. That's a bigger problem, hypothetical reader. While it's unsurprising that a booming video games industry would seek out additional revenue streams because that's the way running publicly traded companies works, you're also forgetting that the industry is one plagued with the same boon that makes games like Draw Something so popular -- people want free (or fractionally-cheap) entertainment and they want it now.

It's a two-headed beast -- on one hand, you have pirates who are not paying for your game but have a copy that they did not pay for; while on the other, you have an explosive game resale industry that is even creeping into stores that have only sold games new for the longest time.

In games resale as in games piracy, the manufacturer of the game makes $0. Nothing. None dollars. And while I'm not going to argue for either side of the debate in this space, if you are a publicly traded company and many units of your product are moving, but you are seeing no return despite that movement, you're missing out on money, and that's not good when your job is to make the money from the products you put out.

But, up until this point, we've opened our doors to this. All of the forum posts in the world complaining about ads in games haven't dented game sales. And for the advertisers, even pirate and resold copy players are going to be told to drink refreshing Mountain Dew -- it's a win-win situation for them!

My hope? Aside from continuing my vampire analogy? That creative use of ad space -- once again, Nuka Cola -- doesn't disappear. Ads in games aren't new or interesting, even if real-world corporate advertisements in-game are certainly a newer concept (not entirely, of course, unless you think the Cool Spot game for Genesis was unrelated to 7-Up's 90s mascot Cool Spot), but we've also seen some neat, interesting, fun, and original things come out of these fantasy video game worlds. I'm hoping that corporate influence doesn't completely kill that going forward.