Any game developer will tell you that games aren’t cheap to develop, and, if anything, costs are skyrocketing out of sight. So in order to offset these ballooning prices for making games, one research group is predicting that game companies will start to sell more and more in-game ads within their titles. Good news for the game publishers, but maybe not such good news for gamers. Will we see McDonalds ads in games such as Final Fantasy or Gears of War one day? We sure hope not.
Paul Verna of eMarketer, an industry market analyst firm, predicted, "…in-game advertising will evolve in scope and sophistication, offering new platforms for marketers, new business opportunities for technology providers and vital revenue for game developers, who have struggled with the escalating production costs of increasingly complex games."
Verna estimates that ad dollars for in-game ads increase greatly each year. "… over the next five years video game advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%, reaching nearly $2 billion by 2011."
What this means is that our games may take on a decidedly different look and direction in the future where game titles will be crowded with more and more ads. And although promises have been made in the past about in-game ads not being too distracting, there still leaves some doubt as to just how many ads can be in a game without being a total nuisance. The answer to that question will be answered when game sales start to decline when too many ads appear in games.
