Quote:
Originally Posted by funkychinaman
You said it, CoD and Battlefield introduces these products to an entire generation of impressionable consumers. Companies pay for product placement and ads in games like Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, why should it be any different with guns? Why should Activision, and by extension, we the consumers, have to pay for the privilege of seeing the Remington script plastered on a few guns? Jeep pays for their product to be in CoD, why not Remington?
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Well, think of it in terms of cars, which have been doing this kind of thing for years. A game company goes to Ferrari and says "we'd like to put an Enzo in our new game." Now, who is asking who for a favour here?
1. Most of the people who buy the game are not going to be able to buy a Ferrari.
2. The game designers benefit from the Ferrari being in the game because people want to drive one.
3. Spreading brand recognition among people who cannot or will not buy their product does not actually benefit Ferrari.
Therefore, it's the game designers who stand to gain most, so Ferrari is going to ask them for money because they're not a charity and want to get something out of the deal. This goes even more for flight sims, since
nobody who plays
Ace Combat is going to go to Sukhoi and order an Su-37.
With gun companies, you have to remember that their potential market is:
1. People who live in jurisdictions that haven't outlawed civilian ownership of guns.
2. People who live in jurisdictions that haven't outlawed civilian ownership of that specific gun (so that's all the NFA guns gone for a start).
3. People who are in a position to buy that specific gun and would not have done so without seeing it in the game.
That, realistically speaking, isn't all that many people. In fact the real gun company would probably find it's more likely to boost sales of Airsoft replicas they don't make rather than real guns they do. For the most part, the guns the designers request are going to already be big-name "cool" weapons because otherwise the designers themselves wouldn't have heard of them, so the brand recognition argument is also pretty dubious.
Bear in mind car companies have been doing
exactly what he talks about in the video for decades, and to a far greater extent than Barrett dictating that they won't let you put the M107 in your game if it sucks. I remember the first time I heard of that was back in 1993 with
Jaguar XJ220 for the Amiga, where the game only showed the car stopping when it hit obstacles, because Jaguar had said that they would not allow it to be shown crashing or being damaged in any way.