Filed under: Games
In-game advertisements phoning home with your personal info
It's a foregone conclusion that video games are the next big medium for advertising, and ads in games have already become pretty commononplace. Most people will put up with them, despite the fact that they already paid a forty bucks or more for the game. But what about when the ads start connecting to the ad agency's servers over the Internet to tell them about your playing habits? As reported by our pal Vladimir at Joystiq, that's exactly what's happening with Vivendi's SWAT4: not only does the game download new advertisements to show you while you're playing, it also tells Vivendi's advertising partner, Massive, how what time you start and stop playing, and how much time you spent looking at each ad.
Head over to Joystiq for more details, or read the complete report (including how to block the ads and the intrusion) by Andrew Smith and Peter Wood.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Max said 4:03PM on 8-10-2005
This technology is both annoying and offensive. If games are ad supported they should be free.
What's the difference between this and adware?
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