Agreed wholeheartedly. I’ve personally always found in-game advertising to be more amusing than intrusive. Not to hop medias or anything, but this example is more familiar to me: Code Geass is an anime that was sponsored by Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut logos are plastered ALL OVER the series, and it becomes like a “Where’s Waldo?” game. Spot the overt Pizza Hut advertising! It’s entertaining and incredibly, incredibly amusing. In turn, Pizza Hut printed ads for Code Geass on tons of its pizza boxes and offered merchandise for the series as part of their rewards program, etc. Everyone wins! It wasn’t like Pizza Hut was ever intrusive to the series. And bonus points go to Pizza Hut when cosplayers require a real pizza to complete their costume. Everyone wins.

You never need advertising. It’s always your choice. Personally, I always prefer it when creatives put their integrity first and give a David Lynch “fuck you” to product placement. Occasionally it’s suitable, such as billboards lining sports arenas or licensed guitars in music games. But for the most part adverting is just annoying. Plus, there’s a massive difference between a poster for a game at a bus stop and having the lead video game character sipping Coke. At the end of the day people should create because they want to, not to make money.

@Kyle: You misunderstand me. I don’t think in-game adverts are a necessity, and I’m not saying they’re needed to “make money”, either. The problem with games is that they’re a multi-million dollar expense right now, with projects like MGS4 requiring as much in production as any Hollywood budget movie. Because games don’t have the same hits at the box office that movies tend to have (I mean, a $60 game versus a $8 movie ticket? $5 in Mexico? $20 DVD?) it’s much harder to get the cost of production back from sales.

You can argue that making games shouldn’t be about making money, but it is what it is–an INDUSTRY, and you need people and gear and liscences to make games, and it costs a lot of money. I love games and I don’t make them because I want to earn money–but I need to make SOMETHING from my job, and I need money to make games. The way it’s been told to me is “Game designers love games. We’d be making games even if we weren’t working in the field. So we might as well make money from it.” I also need money to PLAY games. And eat. There’s no way around it–you NEED to make money to survive. In case you forget, the starving artist is largely unsuccessful, unimportant, unremarkable and mostly UNHAPPY.

Sure, you can make a game by yourself and reduce cost down to you your own personal expenditures, saving you a loooot of money, but that can still be a huge cost for one person, and imagine the manhours that have to go into one person making a whole game themselves. Not only that, but the likelihood that you achieve high-caliber quality work compared to the rest of today’s games is next to nonexistent. It just won’t be that impressive because you have too much to do, too much to focus on to pay attention to the miniscule details one dedicated person could. That’s why we have development teams. It can be good–but it doesn’t mean people will buy it. I mean, what’s more interesting to the MASSES: a game made entirely by Joe Somebody, or a team made by multinational rock stars that are responsible for a wide array of games that you’ve already played and love?

Sometimes you get the little star in the sea: Google “bob’s game”.
But that’s really a one-in-a-million light. The rest of us can’t do that.

Seriously? Having a character drink a coke in your game is annoying? How? Aside from all the social and economical debate associated with product placement, how is it any different from a character drinking an unmarked can of soda, which half the country generalizes as “coke” anyway? Some trademarks are so pervasive in our society that you don’t notice them anymore; we substitute brand names for products. Not all soda is Cola-cola. Not all tissue is Kleenex. Does it detract from your gaming experience because HOLY SHIT, that character is drinking PEPSI. Would you avoid buying an otherwise amazing game because, GODDAMN, they’re advertising Samsung? (Did any one skip out on Advent Children because Nokia phones were all over it?) Chalk it up to principle all you want, but if it doesn’t change your experience dramatically and it’s good for all the companies involved, then… why not?