Things That Annoy Me - Wartune's Advertisements

I've been seeing a lot of advertisements for an MMO called Wartune lately. Here's everything that these ads tell me about this game.

Wartune has half naked women in it.

So, this game apparently has boobs in it. That's nice, but is it worthwhile for gamers to pay their hard earned money to play Wartune? If so, how much does it cost? Is it free to play? What does the game look like? What genre of game is it? I assume that it's an RPG, but it could also be a fighting game, or honestly, pretty much anything. These ads say nothing substantial about the game that they're trying to sell. To be fair, I did find some that advertised the game...

MMO gibberish! And cleavage!

But I had to seek that one out with a Google image search. Most of the ads are shit like this...

That armor is ridiculously impractical. There's no joke here, I'm just pointing out the obvious.

This isn't an uncommon advertising tactic for low budget MMO's. Remember Evony? For those of you who don't, it was apparently a crappy MMO strategy game that stole graphics from Age of Empires that advertised with boobs, implying that you can "play discreetly on your browser," even though there was nothing to be discreet about, because there was no sexual content in the game, and was shameless enough to sometimes just have lingerie clad breasts and captions along the lines of "come play with me." This is the future of advertising, folks. Admittedly, I doubt they got an actual ad agency to work on this, because that's blatant false advertisement. At least Wartune doesn't get that bad...

Ha! I lied! And so did they.

Is anyone really even surprised by this? The game doesn't have an AO rating. As far as I know, it doesn't have any ESRB rating, because it's a browser game. It's no more required to get one of those ratings than the porn games on Newgrounds.com. Except this game isn't a porn game. As far as I can tell, it's just a dime a dozen MMORPG. That's the only thing I did research on this for. Truth be told, I didn't even need to do that. I've seen plenty of ads for pornography online before, and they all had one thing in common - they had pornography in them, and scantily clad women flashing a come hither stare isn't pornography. The Dead or Alive games are more pornographic than Wartune.

I don't have any problem with sexualized material in an advertisement. If that's the route you want to go, that's fine. The problem is that sex doesn't really sell nearly as well as you think. If we're talking about suggesting sexual material to someone, then they'll probably check it out, but they won't necessarily pay for it. It isn't hard to find free porn on the internet. It also isn't hard to buy real porn. We live in a time when it's really easy to get pornography. People are desensitized to this, and showing some animated boobs in an advertisement isn't going to result in too much interest.

If you're saying "Hey, we have an awesome game here, check it out," and showing a sexy woman flashing a suggestive glare, like in the following ad, it might work...

I doubt many female gamers would be interested. You don't need to put up the sign.

But it doesn't. No mention of the gameplay itself, just a scantily clad albino chick making fuck me eyes. I particularly love the "No girls allowed" message here. They're assuring people who click on the ad that women won't spoil the fun by being bad at video games and talking endlessly about how much they love chocolate, or whatever it is that women do.

I don't have any sort of moral problem with shameless cheesecake like this, in fact, I don't mind it at all if it's done well, like with Bayonetta. What I do have a problem with is being pandered to, as I find it highly insulting to my intelligence, and to the intelligence of male gamers everywhere. Most male gamers are of at least average intelligence and most of us aren't cave men who think only about boobs. That's not to say we won't turn into drooling idiots at the sight of an attractive woman, but the stereotype of us being one track mind neanderthals who only think about sex is highly insulting.

- Update! -

I was unfair to Wartune's ads. They're bad and I don't regret tearing into them one single bit, but in hindsight, comparing them to Evony was a little much. Here's a compilation of Evony advertisements, and they're much more pathetic than anything I've seen from Wartune. Also, at least Wartune keeps with the swords and sorcery theme. Evony took stock images from porn movie covers from the 1990's.

http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/a-history-of-evony-ads-the-insanity-continues/

So for what it's worth to the folks who made Wartune, I apologize for comparing you to Evony. Nothing else in this article, though. You deserve all of that. Also, from what I hear, Wartune isn't a bad game. I doubt I'll ever play it, as I'm not an MMORPG guy, but if I get bored of Star Wars The Old Republic and still want to play an MMORPG, I might give it a shot.

Also, I should point out that the art from Wartune's ads is very well drawn. There's a lot of attention to detail, it does a great job of capturing the feel of a swords and sorcery setting, and while the costumes are stupid and impractical, they're well designed. They'd just function better as lingerie than they would as armor. I sort of want to know who the artist is, because whoever he/she/they is/are, there's some obvious talent there, and I want to see more of their work.