Are ad supported free games the future ?
Would you play ad supported games if they were free ? I think the main question that has be to answered before you can give me an answer is the way the ads are displayed. Are they only shown during startup or ingame as well ? This is unfortunately a question that I can't answer right now but I can post links to some ad supported games by Ubisoft - full versions of course.
Ubisoft decided to make some of their recent games available for free in an ad supported version which can be downloaded exclusively from Fileplanet. The games that can be downloaded are: Rayman Raving Rabbids, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Far Cry and are available for US-Residents only.
You will also need a Fileplanet account to be able to download those games. Those are surely some hassles and I would personally not go through them to play those games but I know that some will do that.
The major difficulty that I have with this releases is that there are zero information regarding the type of advertisement provided by Ubisoft or Filefront.
I did found more information on Darren Gladstone's blog where he confirms that the ads are only displayed during load and sage operations. That means no ads during gameplay, for now.
All games have a size of one Gigabyte+ which means that it takes some time if you download it from Fileplanet, one of the many download sites that I absolutely do not like and do not intend to use.
Some users reported that you only need a US Ubisoft account to make them work even if you currently live in another country.
Update: Free games supported by ads have not really taken off. It seems that companies like Ubisoft who experimented with free ad supported games have stopped the experiment.
Advertisement
i already get this!!! bf2142 anyone?!
Chris
The ads do only show up during the load and save times, but on some games (like Rayman Raving Rabbids), that means you get an ad between every minigame. And there are a lot of minigames, based on my first 10 minutes of gameplay.
Another problem is that there appears to be just one ad that plays over and over and over, making the gaming experience a lot more annoying.
I could see this sort of ad-supported game working, but the way Ubisoft and McDonald’s have tacked ads onto existing games is just clunky and annoying.
Ok i am not in US. SO how can i get the game ?
Anyone?
Well, to be honest, it doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, though I really don’t think I’d tolerate more ads than these…