by Karen Hertzberg on Apr 10, 2008
So, will we see a "Viva
Viagra!" ad?
In-game advertisements are often an extremely serious issue. Community
opinion of in-game ads often runs in a black and white spectrum, a
love/hate sort of relationship. So when the developers of City of
Heroes announced that they would be placing real world ads on the
billboards in their MMOG, the entire massively multiplayer industry
perked up to see how their community would respond. As gamers continue
to voice their opinions on the CoH forums, Ten Ton Hammer's Cody
"Micajah" Bye sat down with Brian Clayton and Matt "Positron" Miller to
find out exactly why the NCsoft NorCal studio opted to place in-game
ads into their MMOG.
Matt
Miller: It was really just a logical fit for us. We
already had a
lot of fake billboards in the game, and we really much prefer those to
be real to enhance the immersion. The billboards we first included in
the game are obviously fake and some are meant to be funny, but it
makes sense for us to put real advertisements up to make the city feel
more real and more alive.