The Stupid Gamer

Electronic Arts, the world’s largest videogame publisher, has inked a deal with Massive, Inc. to bring in-game advertising to some of their upcoming releases; including Need for Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142. The deal will allow EA to place sponsored content within the games that can be rotated regularly.

I’m fine with sponsored content being in games if it’s non-intrusive or if it actually lends to the realism of the game. Having sponsors on the sidelines of Madden works well, and having Dole brand bananas in the Monkey Ball games is great. Hopefully we don’t see these ads in an out-of-place fashion ever. Publishers like EA are already charging $60 for titles, the last thing that will please gamers is to shove ads down there throats that don’t seem natural.

If companies like EA are going to start placing ads into games to “offset development costs,” shouldn’t they also pass some of those savings onto the consumer? If you are going to have to see ads each time you jump online to play with buddies in a round of Battlefield, shouldn’t the game cost $5-$10 less? We all know that this won’t happen, but it’s an interesting possibility to think about.

So I guess we’ll just swallow the ads for now and keep on playing. Soon, like microtransactions, in-game ads will just be another thing you are forced to accept in order to experience the “next-gen” in gaming.

Source: CNN Money

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Multiconsole, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.