Planet Gadgets Gadget Blog

Top games publisher to fully embrace dynamic ingame advertisement

by Administrator

If you’ve played a few video games, chances are that at least one of them was published by Electronic Arts, which stands head and shoulders the competition as the world’s leading games publisher. However, not satisfied with its net revenue of over $3 billion (2005), the company is to roll out ingame advertising immediately, having already signed deals with two major advertisers. The ads will stream over the web and dynamically change over time, keeping them fresh.

Needless to say, this is an act that’s going to cause some major controversy within the games community, and in fact already has. Although EA recently introduced advertising to its top racing series “Need for Speed”, it hasn’t caused too much of a stir as the ads simply run on the billboards which surround the track just like they do real life; the sense of authenticity has largely managed to deflect criticism.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite so smoothly with the next game on EA’s ingame ads agenda: Battlefield 2142, a futuristic sci-fi shoot-em-up based in a war ignited by an ice age rapidly wiping out life on Earth. Needless to say, advertisements for the likes of Coca Cola and Burger King could look extremely out of place in this alternate reality. And yet, it’s going to happen.

Personally I’m feeling very uneasy about the whole situation. Although I understand that development costs for games have ballooned now that the latest wave of hardware is upon us, meaning that developers have to spend significantly longer creating the level of detail in games that fans demand, the fact remains that there’s a very fine line between immersion and annoyance when it comes to advertisement. No gamer wants the game he just dropped $60 on (average Xbox 360 game price) to be full of ads.

Although it is realistic to see billboards in real life and they wouldn’t look too out of place in a lot of games due to their tendency to take place in real-life environments, you have to remember that the real-life implementations themselves are hardly subtle. You only have to look at other mediums to realise how bad it could potentially become once the advertisers realise how much money is in the area, with the Washington Post claiming it could be a roughly $1 billion market by 2010.

Watch a game of sports on TV and you have massive posters and billboards filling every shot. Once the commercials come around you have to endure several minutes of continuous, loosely targetted advertisements. Ads and product placements never leave your eye, and your programmes are completely interrupted for minutes at a time. What’s to say that this won’t eventually happen to games if a stand against it isn’t made?

And that’s why I have a lingering worry about ingame advertisement, even if the current plans aren’t particularly extreme. What do you think about ingame advertisement and its long-term implications?