Product placement has always been a part of gaming. We want to look back on it a bit today and talk about how it is coming back into gaming now.
The Old Product Placement
In older games the product placement was blatant. Games like “Yo Noid” and “Cool Spot” had their very games inundated with ads. You literally played as the mascots themselves. Unfortunately such games were often not very good. Anyone who can tell me Cool Spot is objectively a great platformer is just lying to themselves. I did enjoy “Yo Noid” fairly well though.
The Modern Era
The current era sees the same glut of games like this. Including a wide variety of Naruto and Bleach games that vary from decent to absolutely horrendous that many kids play today without realizing how terrible they are. Product placement is still alive and well in the old form. Due to this, many companies today design their products to appeal to a niche market. For this reason, a design thinking workshop is often conducted to educate and train the product designers of the company. Following the workshop, the designers are asked to take exams to determine whether the workshop was helpful to the employees. For the designers to meet the company’s requirements, this is an important step. Simply put, this is a way to analyze your employees for gaps in skill related to designing products.
After all, an attractive product design can have an effect on sales. Hence, it might be imperative to train and educate designers on a regular basis. Having said that, many mobile games also have billboards, pop-ups, or graphics that promote other products for which they are often paid. These companies which promote other products have in place a particular payment system (see here for more info) which helps them streamline their finances. But it must be kept in mind that many of these hurt the gameplay by interrupting it.
The New Trend
The staff at Green Throttle games are paying developers a 20 percent commission for each controller sold through their game. Others are already doing things like this with game developers. This trend has many positive and negative factors including:
- More funds for underfunded developers
- More funds for fat and greedy developers who will bloat their already bad games
- An increase in product placement within games
- Increasing profits for those who place the ads themselves
- A growth in the business of gaming
Gaming is becoming more and more like traditional big business every day. With many companies it is already indistinguishable from other large industries. This certainly is having a lot of negative ramifications for gamers already. That does not mean it inherently is a bad thing, just that no business thus far knows how to deal properly with massive profits however as it stands now this is a bad thing but some company could find a way to make it work. Tell us how you feel about the issue.
