Video game advertising company Massive recently signed a deal with Vivendi to integrate ‘live’ advertisements within their titles. The first title was the strategy-shooter SWAT4. As one might expect, gamers took about two seconds to find a way to block the origin of the ads. Details here. Nothing a dedicated anti-marketing gamer wouldn’t have already done to block ads on his favorite gaming sites – disallowing ads.* in your hots.etc file is an old trick to block web ads – but it’s probably not going to be long before a patch is going around to enable this with a simple Doubleclick of the mouse (pardon that ad-related pun, please) to allow the less-technical gamers to avoid these in the future.
Gamers love to hack these titles (see ‘Hot Coffee’); if in-game ad technology is going to take off, it’s going to need to be smarter about how these features are implemented. And I have to guess that there may not be too many sponsors who would be happy to see that hostage’s blood spattered on their ad if the player is too slow and the terrorists get to her first. Or maybe that’s just me.
Kitten War is a site with a simple idea: people send in scans of their kitties, and then two kittens enter, with only the cute kitten leaving. Fair enough, but the golden nugget of this site is not the cute stuff, it’s the hall of losers. These are not happy animals. Looks like the kitten equivalent of a media indecency watch group.
Coca-Cola is creating custom content for the PSP game Wipeout Pure, available only to users in Japan as of now. The content will include new ships, courses, menu graphics etc. This is, AFAIK, the first time a sponsor has developed this type of ‘add-on’ functionality for a portable title like this. Could this be where the much-discussed advertising dollars start being spent to reach the refugees from traditional media who spend their time blowing stuff up sted watching the boob tube?
Gamespot’s cobbled together quite a collection of interesting details about SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo for the PSP. The handheld version of the shooter, set to hit stores on Nov. 8, will feature WiFi multiplayer mode, data syncing with SOCOM 3 on the PS2 and an instant action mode which will drop you into a firefight for five to 10 minute bursts.
The game will include 14 single player missions, each set in different international locations.
