Gaming Product Placements

while visiting gamespot we came across an article depicting the ever popular product placement and company alliances within using video games. www.gamespot.com/pc/action/darkenedskye/news_6091835.html
In reading the article it unvailed several key issues involving internet marketing using games. One of the more specific things i focused in on was the ubisoft fiasco that took place in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3. The company linked a url in the game but never registered the domain. And some one found it unregistered and made a porn site with it. This was clearly a disaster in the eyes of the marketers who meant to use the website for promotional purposes. The whole point is you almost never see TV advertising for most games that aren't dynesty games, such as madden or halo. And you almost never see a commercial for a PC game that doesn't have a company history of excellence. Almost all games for PC's, from my experience, are marketed through the internet using website gamers frequent, i.e. gamespot or ign. And almost all games are judged and weighted by gamers themselves, much like Amazon's system of comments by consumers is also conducted. So what this article is telling me is that large companies are going to unite with large games to form both subtle and overt product alliances within them. What strikes me as brilliant about this is the fact that most people in my age group have the ability to ignore advertisements and banners on websites, from the book, and the one thing i've never been able not to notice is a big billboard in a game with a company's logo on it. Two examples of games like that are VTM: Bloodlines, where the company's who made the game had huge billboards in the game with logos on them, and C&C red alert 2, where westwood studios advertised an upcoming game on billboards within the game.