The dread of many gamers is the eventual arrival in mass of in-game advertising. They’re about to get a lot more of it if one analyst prediction is correct, with expected in-game advertising spending to double in the next five years. While product placement is nothing new in games (you can find it in many NES era titles and earlier), the idea of served ads appearing in games is relatively new.

eMarketer predicts that in-game advertising will rise from $295 million in 2007 to $650 million in 2012. They base this upon, among other things, the continuing increase in revenue in hardware and software in the game industry. The interesting part is that this may actually be an under estimate of the increase gamers will see. (more…)

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Rob Enderle over at TG Faily has a fairly interesting piece up about the potential future of Google in gaming. What, Google? Did you think Apple was the only computer company considering a move into gaming? According to Enderle, Google may very hold the future to gaming.

Cloud computing, centralized computing or whatever buzz term you’d like to use is being touted as the future of computer software. Essentially, the desktop will be the browser and all software will run remotely on computer servers. This is the same idea that was kicked around in the late 90s with the idea of workstation PCs in every home instead of desktops. Technology hadn’t quite caught up then, but with services such as Meebo and Google Documents it finally is. (more…)

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With the announcement of Quake Live this week, a new free to play through your web browser version of the shooter classic, advertising supported games got a huge boost. Once the market of cheap knock-offs and severely outdated classics, advertising supported gaming is now getting big name supporters such as id Software with Quake Live and Electronic Arts with Battlefield Heroes. That’s both good and bad news for gamers.

Interested users can now sign up via the QuakeLive.com web site to be part of the eventual beta test. Once live, the game will allow players to play a new advertising supported version of Quake right through their web browser. Ads will supposedly be dynamically targeted to players as they play. In other words, expect lots of ads for Family Guy DVDs. This is very similar to the model announced by Electronic Arts for their Battlefield Heroes game, which will game a cartoon look to the open field war game. That model does add in microtransactions, which presumably would be focused around new weapons and ways of customizing your character. (more…)

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