A New Company is Trying New Approach to In-Game Ads

The games industry is one of the fastest-growing and biggest in the entire field of entertainment, but it’s also one of the most expensive: movies may set you back hundreds of millions, but triple-A games aren’t that far off, and what's more, movies don’t have to really compete with lower-budget indie titles that take up the same digital shelf space that they do. Given this, it’s understandable that studios are always looking for a way to make more money, although we can all agree that more than a few times they’ve crossed the line on what's okay and what’s not… at least until they just moved the line.

One such overreach was reported by Axios, as a new company called playerWON (frankly I’m surprised it took us this long to make that awful pun) has patented a new way for studios around the world to nickel-and-dime their player base: in this case, by introducing TV-style ads into their games.

Now, at first glance, this is incredibly alarming. At second glance, it’s also nothing terribly new: sports games have had unskippable in-game ads for years now, and oftentimes racing games will sell digital billboard money to real companies. So in that respect, this new “innovation” is a little ho-hum: what makes this take on the concept new is that all of these ads would be opt-in. So instead of getting an ad basted in your face between rounds, you can choose to watch an ad in exchange or a bit of in-game currency.

And what’s more, Hi-Rez (the folks behind Smite) and EA have already signed up to try this new system themselves. In fact, Smite was used as an in-game testing grounds for the system, and the results are pretty predictable:
 

Data from one of Simulmedia’s pilot campaigns with Smite, a F2P multiplayer battle arena game from Tencent’s Hi-Rez Studios, shows that players were much more likely (22%) to play a game and spend money within the game (11%), if they watched in-game ads that gave them access to more gaming perks.

So that’s the future of gaming, folks: a future where we’re not forced to watch adds, but feel kind of compelled to do it anyway because of FOMO or whatever. God bless America.