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Intel Invades Johari
by Jolex Del Pilar

Tuesday, September 16 2003

Is it right for advertisements to run inside the environment of our favorite games?

Hello Sir.

My name is Robert, and Im from Copenhagen.

I read your review of planetside, and being a planetside player myself, I found it good and reliable.

However. Since you reviewed Planetside, it has had a MAJOR game change, that certainly needs a review, since this is the first time in the history of computer gaming, that I have seen this change inside a game.

Planetside has ads, all games have ads, nothing new there, the new thing is, Planetside have placed the ad inside the game itself, while you are immersed in the gaming experience, you are suddenly exposed to an Intel commercial.

I ask you to kindly load up planetside, and see for yourself what Im talking about, Im sure you will agree that the PLACEMENT of the ad, is in a totally different spot than in any other game.

You, as a reviewer, need to carefully examine this feature, because this is most likely something we will see in the future, this is a chance to review it for the first time in history.

I would like you to considder one particular angle, immersion.
Immersion is something CRUCIAL to a book, or a movie, and up untill now, a game, they sell the game with a story about being on an alien planet ........ with Pentium 4's ???

Please look into this, and if you decide to review it, would you be so kind as to inform me in an Email ?? I would hate to somehow miss the first review of advertising INSIDE a game.

Thank you.

Robert Christiansen

Hello Robert,

First off, welcome to VGLN.com. Whenever we get a Danish reader, we are always reminded of the great Danish contributions to American cuisine in the form of such unique dishes like Stegt Flæsk and Persillesovs.

As for your letter, interesting. Of course, advertisements within video games is not something that's unprecedented. It's happened before in numerous sports related games, and the new James Bond games actually feature a menu screen that is obviously based around an Omega time piece.

In fact more recently, Erik Dochtermann, chief executive of advertising firm Katz Dochtermann Epstein bought ad placements in the PlayStation 2 version of Midnight Club 2 for Coke, Krispy Kreme, Def Jam and Skechers at $5,000 a pop. (Source: Forbes.com)

The point of it is, that like movies, video games are a potentially lucrative and far reaching method of product placement for advertisers. Developers benefit, and advertisers do as well. Right now, $5,000 for an ad placement is relatively cheap (that same placement in say the new "Matrix" movie might cost 20 times that).

However you do bring up some great points. First off, should immersion be sacrificed for in-game advertising? Indeed, Pentium 4 advertisements do seem out of place in the space combat world of PlanetSide. Some gamers consider immersion a large part of gameplay, and so do we here at VGLN.com. Given that, I would have to agree, the ad placement chosen by SOE and Intel might suffer from a bit of folly on both sides. However, not having seen the actual ad placement yet (haven't been on the PlanetSide servers for about 3 weeks), I have yet to see just how distracting they actually are.

Any gamers who have screenshots of this in progress are welcome to send their screens to us. Until then, we'll reserve judgement and take a "wait and see" stance until we give our final opinion.

--- Jolex Del Pilar