There's plenty of room for innovation in the mobile game ad space.
I actually do like the strategy of making the ads part of an achievement system for the game. This would work especially well for localized ads. For example, if you reach a certain level on a game, get $2 off your sandwich at Subway. This allows for brand exposure and funnels people into the physical stores.
My wife stopped letting our son play Angry Birds on her phone because of the scantily clad ladies advertising "meet sexy singles in your area". When will Adblock Plus port to Android?
Here's the solution I use: turn off all networking capabilities when playing Angry Birds. The Power Control widget (on my phone at least, Droid Incredible with Cyanogenmod) allows you to quickly turn off wifi and cell data transfers. You can still receive calls and texts, but the ads won't load.
Moral questions raised by this are left as an exercise to the reader.
Sorry, but AdBlock on a game like Angry Birds IS stealing.
Rovio certainly has a lot of money, but other developers aren't so lucky -- and many are barely scraping by.
Try investing nearly $5000 and seven months of your life in developing a game that's being ad supported, where your income relies on ads, and then watch people joke about blocking them. It sucks, trust me.
I don't disagree with you, but drcube's point is a serious and valid one. It also smells like an opportunity for devs and/or ad networks to provide much better targeting. Ad-supported games for kids should be able to get kid-appropriate ads if the developer or the parent so choose. I haven't done enough ad-supported game development to know if that kind of thing is currently possible, but its something I would look into if a 5 year old were using my ipod regularly.
My game as an example: Almost half of the users are under 18, but most of the other half are in the 18-35 range (according to Flurry metrics, which guesses what the age of a user is based on what OTHER apps on the device are reporting -- I'm not asking them myself).
Unless I ask each user how old they are, I can't know whether or not to serve them ads. And if I DO ask them, then people often feel like I'm prying too much. ESPECIALLY if I'm asking if they are under 15 (and finding out they're under 13 would cause COPPA to kick in [1]).
I already have the "no adult ads" selected in my ad provider, which is supposed to block singles ads, but I've seen them come up anyway. Presumably if I fed them an age that I'd gotten from a user they would be filtering the ads more, if only to target them better.
How is removing something that was given to you in a package stealing? If someone gave me a free magazine, but the magazine had ads, you're saying it'd be stealing to rip those pages out?
Magazines are paid for the number of ads they distribute. And the ads DID make it to you, so even if you go through them all and rip them out, you ARE being exposed to them, if only briefly. And the ads can't be all destroyed unilaterally by installing MagazineAdBlock.
If you block ads, you have NO chance of seeing them, and therefore I have no chance of making the $0.03 that's typical from a single click. And worse, if you block those annoying ads, then you have no motivation to BUY the version without ads!
If everyone blocked ads, you would have no more free games to steal. If you don't want ads, buy games without ads. Don't try to hide behind bogus rationalizations. Blocking ads is clearly unethical, even if you don't want to call it stealing, because the developer intends to make money on his product and is giving it to you with the express understanding that it's ad supported.
HTTP is an inherently request-based protocol. The HTML file that I request from the server has links to ads. A stock browser will request those ad links. Ad block tells the browser not to. So it's more like if someone asks you "hey, I have free ice cream bars, want one?" and after you receive it he then asks "It also comes with this ad flyer. Want it too?" and you say "no, thanks" or take it and throw it in the trash immediately. Is it rude? Sure. Is it stealing? If the legality of the transaction was dependent on me accepting the ad, then that should have been negotiated before you sent me HTTP 200. But that's not in the HTTP protocol. If you don't like the protocol or don't think it's fair, don't use it.
He theorizes that pirates actually might promote the game. My Flurry numbers beg to differ.
My "unlocked" version of the game was pirated on July 15. Almost 2000 new users ran it that day, and all but about 10 of them were pirated copies.
So did I see my sales jump? I sold about 10 units that day, and 5 the next day. I don't think I've seen the numbers top 20 sales per day. If there are moral pirates out there, they didn't show up in sufficient numbers to make up for the devastation that followed.
How about downloads of the free version? Over the next two days, it crashed from consistently getting 750-900 downloads a day to about 350 downloads a day. And because of that drop, it fell off the charts and continued to crash down to 100-200 downloads a day.
So as nice as the theory is -- and as much as it might work for music, where the numbers are MUCH larger and there is some data supporting the theory -- it simply doesn't work for games.
In fact, it pretty much killed my game, because of the way the market rankings work -- the crash in downloads meant it lost position, which meant even fewer downloads, and a death spiral ensued.
So don't give me "piracy is actually good for your game!" when it killed mine. And it's still rated 4.5 stars, with tons of "Awesome game!" reviews, so don't tell me people don't like it.
So notch was talking about piracy and his own game (minecraft). He basically says publishers should approach piracy as part of a game's marketing plan -- kinda like the free version you talk about here.
As for piracy killing your game... bull shit. Every game eventually gets pirated. All the games above you on the charts have been pirated. Why didn't piracy kill them?
They didn't all have premium versions to pirate? Angry Birds didn't.
Some of the top games probably were noticed randomly by the right bloggers; a Russian blogger loved my game, and it's sitting in a nice comfortable position in the Russian Market ranking, for example. Angry Birds was probably featured in EVERY blog that deals with Android games.
Some of the top games also have annoying but effective viral marketing components; I've so far avoided stooping to those depths.
Some of them probably had better marketing plans. I'm a programmer, not a marketing expert.
And if someone inside Google decides randomly to feature a game, then it's set. My game WAS featured on AppsLib, a secondary market, and after it was no longer featured it stayed on top of the free apps ranking at #2 for weeks. As in, the #2 downloaded APP, not game.
Unless you know more than anyone else outside of Google about the actual algorithm Google uses to determine how apps rank, you have no clue as to what could have caused a game to fall -- but a huge fall happens the SAME DAY it was pirated.
It's not proof, but it's a very suggestive correlation. Just because it doesn't match your world view doesn't make it garbage. What's indisputable is that the piracy DIDN'T give me a boost in sales OR downloads, which completely invalidates the "piracy is just another kind of marketing" theory.
There's a lot of random luck involved in getting to the top organically, and the process is potentially fragile unless you've got a lot of cross-promotion you can apply from other apps. Or a lot of money to buy ads. I had neither.
I have to disagree with this strategy. At my company we have made a few one-off games for advertisers and it is always the same story. The advertiser loves the games but the users don't.
The problem with this strategy is that if you're designing a game for an advertiser, they are the ones you have to make happy because they provide the $$$. Users will always be a second priority.
For this strategy to work, it has to fit into why the users love the brand. For instance, for Sneak King (the Burger King XBox game), the game fit in with what the brand's audience found cool and funny, and that was key to its success.
An ad in the comments of an article about how annoying ads in games are. And the article itself turns out to be a sales pitch at the end. Is this... is this double-irony?
Just letting readers know about our option in the space. There are few comments about how no one is taken an adSense approach to how in-game ads work and I wanted to let people know that we are.
I think it's a cute idea, but honestly I don't see how it's going to fool anyone into thinking they've "won" anything.
An ad with a discount is called a coupon, and you can get piles of them from the paper on Sunday. Or from your junk mail. Or online. I don't think people will consider them to be valuable unless they're categorically better than what you find in the paper.
See, I thought companies reduced (you can't stop) piracy of games by making their content so awesome that people wanted to pay for the game. Examples include Valve and Blizzard's lineaup.
Actually, Blizzard is reducing piracy by requiring you to connect to their servers to play the game and sending an army of lawyers after anyone who attempts to create their own servers. Most of the content in StarCraft II disappears the moment you aren't connected to BNet, and what was left over disappears 30 days later. Diablo 3 will not work at all unless you are connected to BNet, and WoW is an MMORPG. S2 has taken a similar approach: their game does nothing unless you can connect to their servers.
I'm not sure what Valve's approach has been. Does it also involves reducing the quality of the games offered by not including LAN play?
Both, actually. The achievement is now seen as simply a vehicle to ram advertisements down your throat, and the offer is seen as some kind of slimy fake deal.
Or maybe you haven't seen all the ads on the net where you've 'won' a discount by punching a monkey, etc?
Strange to me that people are talking about better ways to serve ads in games and apps instead of alternative revenue streams to ads. Ads suck no matter how you position them in your app.
Frankly I don't really see why the article focused on mobile games. The argument against in-game ads being distractions can be applied to advertising in general: billboards on the highway, commercials during tv shows, newspapers filled with page long ads, etc.
however kipp does sound like a good idea - but it might require heavy changes from developers to their game mechanics.
I don't mind the subversive TV advertisements - the can of coke in the bedroom, or the kid playing Xbox while their parents try to talk to them. What's really irritating is when the show comes to a complete halt for what amounts to a product demo (my wife watches Bones and the WP7 bits really bugged me).
Ubisoft has tried in-game advertisements with several of their Tom Clancy games, and its just about as bad. Yes, I'm going through a casino, turn a corner and there's 5 posters on the wall for Prince of Persia. Riiiiiight.
On the flip-side, I wonder if gun makers have any sort of deals with developers - any teenage boy can probably rattle off the names of 10 different machine guns. The same goes for car brands and Gran Turismo/Forza.
"On the flip-side, I wonder if gun makers have any sort of deals with developers - any teenage boy can probably rattle off the names of 10 different machine guns." haha oh wow, that's an eye-opening comment. Could be on to something
I remember at some point, Counter-Strike changed the name of most of the weapons, making them more generic/fictional. Apparently they were worried about trademark issues?
I don't get why it's broken? Any numbers/data to share? Why does Angry Birds contain ads if they're broken? Honestly, not trying to be a dick, just trying to understand the problem.
These guys make plenty of cash with those ads. The bigger problem is that it is one of the only options they have and it comes with the price tag of some users complaining about the experience.
I actually do like the strategy of making the ads part of an achievement system for the game. This would work especially well for localized ads. For example, if you reach a certain level on a game, get $2 off your sandwich at Subway. This allows for brand exposure and funnels people into the physical stores.