Wednesday, September 28, 2005

The Future of Gaming Business: In-Game Advertising

DQ reader Malcolm Cox reminded me via e-mail that Planetside already has streaming ads. I wrote about that a while back, but had completely forgotten since then. And since that's a Sony game, I expect Sony to migrate that strategy to as many of its online games as possible.

Here's an interesting e-mail from Michael O'Reilly:
You mentioned that gamers would soon see advertising everywhere in their games. Well, I point you towards NASCAR 2006 from EA. If there was ever a game that justified what you are talking about that's it. I presume the other NASCAR games have been the same way, but this was my first experience with the series. It's an EA exclusive, and tracks are faithfully recreated, adverts along the race track and all.

I didn't know that, but it's a sound business strategy. NASCAR incorporates an incredible amount of advertising, so to use a NASCAR-licensed product as a gateway to jamming all that crap into games makes perfect sense.

I can even see a day when the in-stadium ads are "hot"--when you hit the game's pause button, you'll be able to move an "advertising cursor" on the screen to select an ad, which will then take you to the product's website. And the game publisher will get paid every time you do that.

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