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"They are known to television executives as the "Lost Boys" - the generation of video-gaming young men who are watching less television and, thanks to ad-skipping technologies such as TiVo, even fewer advertisements. The obvious response is to start putting advertisements into games instead, by incorporating billboards into the game environment, for example. But incorporating static advertisements into games is unsatisfactory. Now that most PCs and a growing number of games consoles are connected to the internet, however, it is possible to update advertisements when required. As a result, static in-game advertisements are now giving way to dynamic adverts, which accounted for $26m of the $76m spent on in-game advertising last year, and will account for 55% of the $182m spent this year, says the Yankee Group, a consultancy."
And thus we come to the new era of advertising, wherein players will be gifted the ability to see things intended to get them buying other things while playing a game. Regardless of whether one looks forward to, is indifferent towards, or outright opposes this, it will happen. Such a thing makes good economic sense not only for advertisers constantly in search of someone to view their products, but also for the developers of video games who need monetary aid.
"Today's games can cost as much as $20m to develop, and selling prices seem to have hit a ceiling at $60 in America and 45 pounds ($90) in Britain. So extra revenue from advertising could help to pay for development as games become more elaborate and expensive. As a rule of thumb, game publishers earn about $5 profit per copy sold. Static advertising typically provides $1 of profit, but by the end of this year dynamic advertising could double that figure."
RPGs are certainly not immune to the cost increases afflicting the video game industry, and though not all RPGs have online components every system and console now has internet access. Billboards and radio ads in an RPG would make poor sense, but there are other ways of sinuating advertising into titles that changes with time thanks to online access. Intrusive? Irritating? Unpleasant? Perhaps if such a thing garnered massive protest it would be reconsidered, but 'massive' is the operating word.
"What's next? Jeffery Chester, director of the Centre for Digital Democracy in Washington, DC, warns of a slippery slope towards 'behavioural targeting'. In March details emerged of a patent filed by Shumeet Baluja, a researcher at Google, for a scheme to build psychological profiles of individual gamers. By analyzing in-game behavior it would assign players to categories such as 'risk-taker', 'stealthy', 'non-confrontational', 'dishonest' and so on, enabling advertisements to be targeted accordingly. Google declined to comment, but furious bloggers denounced the prospect of 'psychographic' rather than demographic targeting. Perhaps those bloggers will soon be offered in-game advertisements for soothing herbal teas and compilations of relaxing music."
Such events will not touch me much, given my propensity for older titles that lack any online access whatsoever. But they do seem a necessary characteristic of the gaming industry's future, particularly since advertising will intrude into every avenue it possibly can and developers do need the money to be derived thereby. Perhaps RPGs will be spared ads during a load screen to 'Snap into a SLIM JIM!' or extolling 'Have it Your Way.' Maybe players of RPGs will be granted a more benevolent form of advertising, one that takes into account the demographic's perceived propensity for more ponderable product. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such a thing.
Quotes taken from The Economist June 9-15 2007, 'Got Game' 73-74.
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