You are in the middle of a battle with only a 1/4 of your health left, all of a sudden a slowdown happens and you know the inevitable ads will come up. You try to quickly finish off the enemy when suddenly, "Have brand x, it will make you super awesome" and then when you try to get your rythem back you find yourself dead.

This would really be fun in stealth based games or racing games too. Games are not a passive experience, most require something called "Timing" I can see this easily getting people killed.

When an ad annoys me, I find myself being turned off from a product and more likely to buy a competitor's product in spite.

Extensive product placement has essentially turned movies into ads; the Pierce Brosnan-era Bond films are what stand out to me, like Tomorrow Never Dies, which was pretty much an extended feature-length ad for Omega and BMW. And who of course didn't notice the Nokia communication system installed in Kirk's stepdad's classic car in the beginning of Star Trek?

What's kind of amusing is how some movies have slyly joked about this (like the Pepsi joke in Wayne's World). For one really mind bending example of movie marketing-turned-parody-turned-movie marketing, see the 2009 film The Jonses.

That's a quicker way to fail at F2P than pay ton win or Farmville models...

Sooooo.... Sony has patented it? Doesn't that happen to basically mean no one else can use those? I'm actually kind of happy about that :D

Aren't Pay to Win and Farmville generally fairly successful? There's a reason why those models are flooding the internet.

There's the successes, which are the ones you hear about and that's why you think it's a successful model, but for every one of those there's dozens of spectacular flame outs. Really, pay to win and the compulsive thing are hard to do sustainably for even a few months, people are susceptible to them but you still have to get the secret sauce just right (and sometimes that secret sauce is partly platform and the exact right time). F2P games that stick around for longer than a year generally are not of that model (with the notable exceptions you've seen in the news, most Zynga games and some stuff like Maplestory, is that the one with the keys that people buy? whichever one has that sucks).

Not necessarily. I means that if anyone else wants to use them, they would have to pay Sony an agreed upon sum for use of their patent.

And THAT is probably the basis for this.

Wouldn't surprise me.

I sadly have a feeling that even if this does pass people will moan for a while then quickly get used to it:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-06-20/
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-04-18/

Although, I'm still trying to hold onto a slim bit of hope. But even if it does, thankfully there are a lot of very talented hackers who have the time to hack it out or modify it out of the game.
edit. I just want to clarify that I'm referring more to paid-for games than freebies. Freebies is only a matter of time.

Frikking DX:HR had one for Star Wars.

So nobody except SONY will use them? Good.

Well, patent applications are full of shit, let's hope the worst part of this shit won't even came near the production phase....

I wouldn't be surprised.

Look at two major forms of media for most people: tv and radio. The shows and music are, for the most part, nothing but filler in-between commercials. And internet - if you want to read something or look at a video, it's not unlikely to be held hostage to a commercial first.

I've been curious about that lately, so sometimes I watch the clock when commercials come on - we're now hitting the five to six-and-a-half minute mark! I've been around long enough to remember when commercials were thirty seconds each and you had four of them; now that amount seems to have doubled.

And some shows apparently are edited now to be even shorter. I've been watching "Friends" forever, and there have been times when parts have actually been cut out. No reason to do that except to make room for even more commercials.

It's bullying. :-) They know many people are turned off by it, so they try to make it impossible to avoid hoping to convert someone.

As long as they don't abuse it, I don't mind that so much, because to some extent, it's common sense.

If they are gonna use a car for a scene, they might as well get paid by a car company to put their car in there.

Similarly, if the protagonists will go to a fast food restaurant in a big city, they might as well get some money from one of the fast food chains to do that.

What I like less is when they get paid in advance by some company to put their product in the movie and then have to alter the script to put the product in there or when they need to alter the script to give the product more emphasis than it otherwise would have received (ie, don't be greedy, stick to the script and take less money because the product is not displayed as prominently as the pusher would like).

With this in mind, I didn't notice the Nokia incident in Star Trek (I'll have to watch it again to appreciate that detail, but I must say I was never a big cell phone buff).

However, the car scenes in one of the Brosnan Bond movies (the one where he could control the car with a remote) annoyed me (if they did that mostly for product placement, they miscalculated, because it impacted the movies negatively for me).

This. You stole my line.

Albeit, I might pay for a good game even if it has ads, as long as they are not intrusive and not a form of DRM (e.g. requiring always online). If it breaks the flow of the gameplay, it is a definite no-no, but if it is a "NVidia - The Way It Was Meant To Be Played" or whatever in the level loading screens, I probably couldn't care less.

You know.. if I were to do something, it would be like this:

Have the games contain something where adverts make sense (like televisions, billboard etc.)
Then allow advertisers to put their adverts on those things. Bonus points (somehow?) if they make it fit into the game world.
Make it optional for the players with simple tickbox in the options or maybe an option "None"/"Appropriate"/"All", where 'appropriate' means 'fits into the games world'.
Let the advertisers know how many people have it switched on so they can adjust how much they want to pay to have them shown.

Unintrusive, optional advertising. If it was set up like that, I think I'd have it on (probably at the 'appropriate' level). Maybe that would even be acceptable to have as the default.

However, I have no idea if there would be enough people who wouldn't either never turn it on or turn it off right away (depending on the defaults) for it to be worth it. I think having the option would be appreciated though.