I don't want to say 'I told you so!' or anything, but:
Van Hemlock: The Acceptance of Defeat
Well, it seems that day is finally here, or at least right around the corner.
EQ2 Forums: Screenshot of Planetside In-Game Advert
Planetside Forums: Disembling In-Progress
Massive Incorporated: Don't Hate Us Because We're Profitable
I know, I know, this all happened a while ago, but so much Stoopid happened while I was away that it's difficult to catch up. I really didn't want to let this one go though, because it's not often I get proven right. I mean playing for free, but enduring adverts is one thing; usually you have an option to pay a bit more, and get rid of them, which I'd gladly do if I enjoyed the game, but not so here. So, the question must be something along the lines of 'Are we okay with this?'. Clearly many people across the MMO community are not, blog and forum rants abound, but I wonder if that matters in the slightest. Planetside, in its current state is an ideal test-bed, and more precisely, the perfect way to present the rest of us with a fait a complis.
Planetside was always a game with a very minority appeal. Personally, I like it, but can understand that even from the word go, it was never that big, and could never attact as many gamers as something more EQ-like. Then, over the years, player fatigue hit it. It is fun, but not something you can grind at perpetually, like EQ. That players can have 'had enough' doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad game, but does mean it's a bad Revenue Stream. You can't have customers walking away, content; you need to get them always pressing the button for more, perpetually unsatisfied, until they break. Then various botched attempts to make it bigger, better, faster, new, i.e. The Robots and UT2K Caves, had a significant detrimental impact on a the remaining player population who did like what was already there.
Today it exists in a rather insignficant maintenance-only state from which it is unlikely to ever noticably recover and, and this is the important bit, the people left playing it now will never leave. They've been through so much, and are either perfectly happy, or totally dependent. Perhaps both. This makes Planetside the ideal testing ground for audacious plans like this, because there is nothing, short of actually turning the servers off, that will make the remaining people still playing Planetside quit.
Against a background like that, any supposed 'trial of new revenue streams' can only come up as a massive success. And once those 'results' are in, "We put ads in Planetside, and no-one quit, and now we have more money!", it becomes very hard to stop that being conclusive proof that every other MMO must have then, now! Game, set and match...
Unfortunately, the only thing that can stop this bleak future, is sacrifice.
Each and every person subscribed to Planetside, must cancel. Remember, at the end of the day, we only have Van Hemlock's Choice; accept, or quit. No amount of forum whining, blog ranting or bizarre virtual sit-in protests is going to help when the only real feedback that anyone who matters is going to be looking at, is 'Revenue Streams'.
So the Adverts will go away when it can be seen that overall income is lower with the adverts in, than with them out, and since SOE are getting income from the Ad people AND the players, the basic artimetic involved shows that we need to lower subscription revenue by at least the amount they are getting paid to put up posters of Duece Biggolo 2 in a game set many thousands of years in the future, on a distant set of planets.
Simple on paper, but I suspect far too many people need their fix of Planetside too much. "I'll just ignore them!" But can you, really? Subliminally? Are you entirely sure that no part of your mind is storing and processing these images? Ad companies aren't stupid, and they wouldn't go to all this trouble if they didn't think it worked.
Anyway...so much rehtoric, you might think, and you'd be right. I need to step up and lead by example...