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I have a vision of a bleak, dystopian future.
In this vision, I head to my favorite next-gen console and pop in my shiny new
DVDHD or Blu-Ray disk. After a moment of loading, my game's main menu appears.
"Final Fantasy XV, brought to you by Coca-Cola" is displayed on my TV screen. I
select "Continue" from the menu and move on. While I wait for my game to load,
the game displays a commercial for a dating website. Finally my game loads, and
I begin to play. Within a few moments I need to check my character's stats. And
so, I go to the menus. Ignoring the sidebar adds for "Ringtones by Square," I
check the info I need and continue playing. After a few moments, a random
encounter occurs and the screen cuts to...not the battle, but a message stating,
"Your battle will begin shortly after a brief word from our sponsors." After
which, an advertisement for a new deodorant assails me! A little timer in the
corner assures me my fight will commence in 20 seconds, but in the meantime I am
trapped in consumer hell.
Sound ridiculous? Maybe for console gamers, but go hit up a game website like
MSN or Yahoo, or even Gametap. This sort of thing is a regular occurrence there.
Only people who frequent those types of sites are fairly used to it. But for a Final
Fantasy title? Say it isn't so, Yoichi Wada! But perhaps it will be in the
near future. Square Enix's president announced in a recent interview that the
upcoming online ability of next-gen consoles like the PS3 could open up a whole
new world of in-game advertising. Details are sketchy at best, but even the
prospect is frightening. Perhaps these ads would be as innocuous as a billboard
in the background as your characters traverse the game world. Or perhaps my
vision isn't as strange as it sounds.
Living in the communication age, the concept of being bombarded by subtle and
not-so-subtle marketing is something we just live with. In television, every few
minutes of programming is buffered by an equal amount of ad time. Sometimes
listening to the radio, it feels as though there's more commercials than there
are songs. And let's not even talk about the Internet! There's so much marketing
on the net we have to develop programs just to filter it down to a tolerable
minimum! Our beloved console games, however, have thus far been free
from such direct advertising. From time to time game programmers have placed
items in their games to promote another title they produce, but other then that
we've been ad-less. A change like this could seriously dampen a game experience.
I don't know about you, but the last thing I want while playing my favorite game
is to watch commercials or kill rampant pop-up ads.
Of course, an even worse possibility occurs to me. Many ad-strewn websites and
services on the web today offer a commercial-free experience...for a fee. Is it
possible that one day, after paying $80 for my new Final Fantasy game, I'll have
to pay a monthly fee just to play without advertisement interrupting me? Once
again this is speculation, but given the nature of advertising on the net and
the growing interest in online gaming in consoles, this isn't out of the realm
of possibility. Unfortunately, the intellectual property of game developers
(i.e. the games they make) are their own to do with as they see fit, and we the
gamers are basically powerless to do anything about such actions, save perhaps
boycotting the product. And I don't see many people doing that with a game
series they love.
All I know is that the concept of advertising on console games worries me
greatly. The possibility for developers to make a little extra money off ads is
too staggering for them to ignore for long, and I fear that even if Square does
not start inserting ads, other developers will. The future is coming RPGamers...what will it bring?
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