City of Heroes - In-game Ads Interview @ TTH

General Manager, Brian Clayton and Senior Lead Designer, Matt Miller answers Ten Ton Hammer's questions on the recently announced in-game ads that will start appearing in Summer 2008:

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you believe there will be any sort of fallout from the advertising deal? Will subscription numbers be impacted at all?

Matt: We definitely hope that subscription numbers aren’t going to be impacted at all, and that’s the reason why we made it optional. We want to give players that option to turn the ads off if they feel so strongly about advertisements in their games and continue to play the game like they normally had been in the past.

Those players will still reap the benefits from any money that is earned through this process, but they don’t have to deal with the ads if they don’t want to. We hope that there’s absolutely no fallout from this decision, and it’s really the reason why we put in that optional switch.

Brian: And to just be clear, if we really thought there was any potential to lose customers over this, we wouldn’t have done it. We think that the optional switch is also very compelling to the advertiser since obviously those players in the game who leave the ads on are willing to view those advertisements.

We feel that the one factor (the optional switch) gives players full control over their experience, which is something that we always strive to do within the City of Heroes universe.

I’d also like to make one other point regarding the revenue itself. Generally, what businesses do is take a percentage of their revenue and reinvest it back into their products and services. We do that as a business as well.

However, with the in-game advertising, there’s no percentage of revenue that’s going back into the business. One hundred percent of the revenue that’s generated from the in-game ads is pushed back into the development team and the game. What’s great about that is that customers have an additional way to support the product and service that they love without ever having to open up their wallets. There’s really very few opportunities in the world where the customer can do that.

It really is a huge win if the customers support this campaign. Frankly, it’s more important to us that the customers enjoy the game that they’re currently participating in. So if in-game advertising isn’t for them, we have zero issues with the customer opting out. Whatever works for them is what we want them to do.

To close out this particular topic, I think there’s some speculation that at some point we’ll change from making this an optional idea to making advertising required.

I have zero interest in doing that. The development team has zero interest in that. This is not an icebreaker to get people to buy into the idea then force it upon them at a later point. Our expectations are that in-game advertisements are 100% optional for as long as we’re going to be having in-game ads in City of Heroes.