Advertising

Elias92x from the PlayStation Forums has taken some snapshots of three massive Grand Theft Auto IV billboards that he encountered in Queens, New York.

More after the jump.

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This new ad campaign makes me feel like a pre-schooler being taught how to add numbers. Sony have now resorted to visual aids to illustrate that buying a PS3 is the sensible thing to do - because it’s a lot cheaper than buying each of its featured components separately.

via MaxConsole

Wii shortages in the UK have led Nintendo to consider pulling the advertising for the console. Nintendo have said that they may “act responsibly” and pull advertising until 2008, when the buying frenzy has calmed down. The current ads are said not to be particularly festive in nature, and hence should be able to be played after the holiday season.

via 1Up

Proliferation of ingame advertising is one thing, but using said advertising to recruit spies is another. Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence agency, intends to do just that. Virtual billboards in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent, will be used to seduce Xbox 360 and PC gamers into a life of surveillance and information gathering. Apparently, the recruits they are looking for are:

computer-savvy, technologically able, quick thinking…We find increasingly we have to use less conventional means of attracting people . . . to go beyond glossy brochures and milk-round stalls.

It’s amusing that they would assume people who enjoy taking part in virtual espionage actually have the balls to do the real thing - although its highly probable that those recruited will be crunching numbers and handling the technical side of intelligence-gathering.

via Kotaku

There is good news for cash strapped independent developers with the launch of MochiAds, an ad network that caters for advertising in independent games. Already supporting over 1000 developers, MochiAds allows them to insert advertising into their game. The games are then virally distributed across blogs, social networks and other sites by consumers.

There are two types of advertising, pre-game and interlevel. They are both designed to not interrupt gameplay and developers are allowed flexibility where the ads show, and are allowed to remove them if they wish. There are no contracts for developers and they can join and leave MochiAds as they wish.

The company was received $4 million in financing from Accel Partners this summer and was founded by Jameson Hsu and Bob Ippolito. Jameson Hsu had this to say about their company:

“We want to support the game development community, and we’re excited to share this opportunity with more people. Our goal is to make our system as easy and useful as possible, so developers can focus on what they love.”

via Gamasutra

We’re bloody sick of all the Halo 3 coverage already, so we’ve compiled it into one giant chunk of news that should satisfy you for another half an hour or so.

• Halo 3 makes $170 million in 24 hours (Major Nelson)
• A nation develops a mysterious new illness (Washington Post)
• Xbox Australia kicks off a Halo 3 themed charity event (Red V Blue)
• Geeks stress over carrying their valuable Halo loot home through rough neighborhoods (MTV Multiplayer)
• The BBC can’t tell their Halo 3 from their Killzone 2 (Kotaku)
• MIT students dress John Harvard statue in Master Chief gear (Gaming Today)
• Bungie defend under-whelming graphics (Opposable Thumbs)
• Olivia Munn licks Master Chief helmet, loses any shred of credibility she once had (Gaming Today)
• New York Times journalist is not impressed (New York Times)
• Legendary Edition purchasers feel ripped off (IGN)
• Master Chief USB flash drives (Kotaku)
• Military recruiters smell the fresh meat (GamePolitics)
• New Halo novel out October 30 (Joystiq)

Sierra has launched a new advertising campaign for Geometry Wars: Galaxies based on the LOLCat uber-meme.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this is marketing brilliance, or the final nail in the coffin for LOLCat humor

GWGCats via GAF