Most people in the world hate ads and the same could be said for dying so what about if we decided to join the two?
Well marketing brilliance for one.
People who require adverts to stay alive, like us, are often stuck with 2 massive problems. We don’t want them to be intrusive but then again if you didn’t see the Dungeon Siege 3 banner up above, or that awesome Zelda advert to the right or the Hunted advert to the left we wouldn’t be earning any cash and would have to close up shop.
Seriously look at them… I need your eyeballs and clicks please…
Okay moving on, so adverts are a necessary evil that aren’t going away anytime soon and game developers have cottoned onto this extra income and have started including ingame advertising to help bring in a little extra cash to help pay for their online infrastructure. But the question remains how to ensure these ads are eyeballed while not annoying your gamers?
Well the CEO of Adam Bohn as solved this problem, sort of, by deciding to make the adverts pop up at the most annoying time in a video game, when you die.
For years our players scoffed at how there was no real punishment for dying in AQWorlds, So we added a fate worse than death… ads!
When you die you will be subjected to a 9 second long advertisement that plays in the time you are waiting to respawn. It’s genius really as they aren’t interrupting gameplay and since it’s such a short time until you respawn they know you are watching the screen and thus eyeballing that ad.
Or if you really hate ads you can subscribe to their online service for a small monthly fee and the ads will disappear along with your money.
I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see EA and Activision shoe horning this idea into MW3 and BF3 before release. I can see it now, you just got owned by some noob in MW3 and then the Killcam pops up with our friend Heidi… I know it would make me feel better.
And yes you can click that header image for a larger version, you’re welcome.
Source: Kotaku
Last Updated: July 6, 2011
