It’s Your Fault

It’s your fault that a small, plucky upstart like Electronic Arts can’t make money. Or, to put it more accurately, you’re the reason companies like EA can’t make more money, as most of the big players in the game industry are currently in the black.
Still, all of these companies will soon go broke—and by “broke,” they mean “continuing to have record years thanks to the overall strong health of the industry”—because you demand that games have high production values. You demand expensive licenses. You demand name-brand voice actors. You demand fancy cinematics. You demand wall-to-wall TV commercials. You demand expensive retail promotions. You demand expensive offices in San Francisco. You demand millionaire CEOs.
Quit screwing up games, you.
Production costs are out of control, people throughout the industry complain, and the only way to save gaming is through the wonder that is the in-game advertisement. Paying $60 for six hours of mediocre entertainment and jump puzzles isn’t enough; you need to give more to billion-dollar corporations. You need to give up your eyeballs, too. And maybe a kidney somewhere down the road.
In-game advertising isn’t exactly new, as you can read in our “Ad It Up” feature on page XX. While it’s true that game development costs are always increasing—those huge launch parties and lavish press events don’t pay for themselves—so are the overall numbers of gamers worldwide. The risks are higher, but so are the potential rewards.
In the case of EA, we’re talking about a multi-billion-dollar company with billions in cash reserves. It’s a wee bit hard to swallow the idea that the smart people who work there can’t figure out how to profit from the economics of game production—incidentally, the same economics that made EA a success in the first place—without shoving advertising down our throats.
One company that hasn’t been whining about the economics of game development is another plucky upstart, Blizzard Entertainment. The company managed to sell 1.5 million copies of its expansion for World of WarCraft, The Burning Crusade (see page XX). In a day. Granted, Blizzard probably spent all of that cash it earned on the development of the world of Outland and the creation of the two new races; after all, the hundreds of artists that make your Draenei Shaman do the “Tunak Tunak Tun” dance don’t come cheap.
Can you imagine how much revenue Blizzard is missing out on by not including in-game ads in the world of World of WarCraft? There’s nothing I like better than sipping a nice Coca-Cola as I adventure in the world of Outland. So why not put up some billboards in the coliseum in Hellfire Peninsula to remind me of my need for carbonated corn syrup? It’s corporate synergy at its most exciting! I’m positively giddy at the possibilities! Or nauseated—there’s a fine line between the two.
Now, can you imagine the reaction from players if Blizzard ever decided to add in-game ads? The sheer quantity of angry blog and message-board posts would clog up most of the tubes that compose the Internet in minutes. Some people might even stop playing in protest… for a few days, at least.
As a gamer, I don’t care whether EA or Ubisoft or Microsoft or Blizzard or any other publisher is profitable. I might feel different if I were a shareholder, or if I found out that each company was losing money and the industry was headed for the sort of widespread crash that befell it in the go-go ’80s. But the runaway success of this past Christmas—largely thanks to Nintendo, with the Wii and DS, and to Sony for the PS2, not the PS3—says otherwise. Don’t complain about costs when you’re recording record revenues and profits. You’re starting to sound like Major League Baseball owners, who whine and whine and whine about revenue disparities, then sign mediocre starting pitchers to five-year/$55 million contracts.
But I understand. The money is there, and you can’t help yourselves. Fine. If you must use in-game ads, use them in ways that makes sense. Put them in free demos; that’s a perfect trade-off. If I want to play a demo version of Battlefield 2142, I have no issue with staring at advertisements between matches or seeing them on billboards in the game itself. I can wrap my brain around ads’ offsetting the costs involved in operating a “free” game, even when the game itself is an ad for the pay version.
But if you’re going to make money selling my eyeballs without passing some sort of savings on to me, I object. It’s an insult to put in-game ads in a $60 game, when there are ad-free ones for the same price. Give me cheaper games, or give my eyeballs a rest.

This article originaly appeared in Computer Games Magazine #196