Oh Oh , Here Come the Biggies

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Warner Bros entered video games in earnest in 2004 when it acquired Monolith Productions, giving it an in-house development department for the first time.

Last year the group also took a 10 per cent stake in SCi.

It also forged a US distribution deal with Codemasters.


Oh oh . Here come the biggies.
Big Business getting into online games ?
There was a CNN survey last week about how the writers strike would affect YOU the TV watching audience. About a third of the respondants reported "We gave up watching TV years ago...so no change".

They're following us online, to our online game worlds. How long until World of Warcraft will have beautiful Adidas running shoes as items for sale in the stores ? In Matrix Online a T-Shirt manufacturer convinced the game to include it's t-shirts so the charactars could try them out before actually buying them and see how they worked. And of course Matrix Online has bill boards all over the place, the last time I played (some time ago , I admit , that game sucks) there were chewing gum ads all over the place. And a lot of empty "this space for rent" signs, the game was deliberately built to include advertising.

I can see it becoming as bad as Cable TV. You paid upto a hundred bucks a month for Cable TV , did't you ? Did that give you ad free viewing ? No. But it did give you lots and lots of watered down shows that would only fascinate a 10 year old , everything else being restricted by the censors. And 18 minutes of ads every half hour but only 11 minutes of show. (including openning and closing credits)

"Son , you have to understand how the business works" piped in one wag when I attempted to complain about this. Yeah , I don't have to understand , i understand perfectly. Your product sucks and I don't want it.