Last night, we talked about WipEout HD‘s latest patch, which included a few nasty surprises for those wanting to play the new “Fury” content. In-game ads had been smuggled onto the game, which ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem — that is, until it came to light that the ads were increasing loading times, forcing the game to slow down so that paying customers could be marketed to.
While a few people claimed this wasn’t the case and that I was just a dirty biased liar with all the fat bias making biased mountains out of biased molehills, it seems that one entity agrees with me that these ads were not acceptable — Sony itself. The platform holder has actually done something decent for a change, and removed the offending ad that was causing loading times to double.
“The ad has been removed from WipEout HD and we are investigating the situation to ensure that any in-game advertising does not affect gameplay,” said a Sony spokesman.
Wow, I’m actually impressed. No advert should ever affect gameplay, and it’s great to see that Sony agrees and would actually listen to irate consumers on this count. That said, this nonsense with WipEout HD could be a grim harbinger of the marketing rape coming our way in future.
