It looks like someone figuring out how to make money from brands while I play my favorite video games. Awhile back I begged Nintendo to let me personalize my Wii experience with my favorite brands, but Nintendo doesn’t seem to be hot to make this happen. Instead, it looks like the gaming software companies will get to reap the rewards.
In today’s New York Times, there’s a story talking about The Sims and their users’ desire for “real” furniture in their unreal world. Enter Ikea!
What person under 30 doesn’t have some sort of Ikea furniture in their house? It’s a perfect match to put Ikea in your Sims’ residence. Even more awesome, you could build a room in Sims to see how it might look in your own home. Dude, check it out, the living room in my game and my home match.
Now we are talking.
If they are smart, they are building in some sort of interactivity where you can easily order Ikea furniture in a virtual world to be delivered to your real world. I could just click on the things I like, get more information like price, actual size, colors and then push the things I want to buy into my shopping cart at the actual Ikea website.
I would even want a way to show my friends my Sims design and get their opinions before I make a real world dollar commitment. I hate making interior design decisions and I value my friends’ opinions – well most of them. It could work two ways, either allow me to push my designs to the web or figure out a way to give the game (free) to my friends which would seed more copies of the game.
This is the perfect kind of advertising. It’s relevant, personal and doesn’t come between me and my user experience.
Now here’s my challenge to Electronic Arts – if Ikea is sending you money, I think that should subsidize the cost of my game. What do you think?
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