In response to an article discussing the rise of videogame advertising at Business Week Online, Slashdot have a post up on this topic.

Atari, explaining the innovation by describing a possible scenario: "The gamer goes online to play a racing game, for example, and a batch of ads is served. When a gamer plays offline, Massive continues to serve ads. The ads are integrated into billboards, posters, and even into the plotline of the game, and they change in real-time."

What are peoples thoughts on in-game advertising? For me I think its all about moderation, in the example above from Atari, ads in billboards in a game isn't going to take anything from the game. Done wrong though it could be really annoying and distract from the game. Then of course there is the money gained from this advertising, will our games get cheaper? Unlikely. If we were in the games industry about 10 years ago I think I wouldn't have minded the developers getting more money, it would promote more games as give the smaller software houses a fighting chance but these days a lot of the big names are huge companies that already make a lot of money. Could this just be the beginning as advertisers need to keep more in our faces to make the same revenue from ads?
Finally a quote from the article at Business Week.

businessweek.com - Advertisers are searching for efficient and cheaper ways to reach the 180 million people worldwide who are playing games, according to DFC Intelligence. For game developers, "investments [to create and market a game] are approaching the size of good-size independent films," says Wim Stocks, an executive vice-president at Atari. "And every publisher is out looking for ways to defray those costs."

Thoughts? post a comment.