In-game advertising a go by Sony [news]

PS3 and Pepsi can now be friends. Well, if Pepsi pays that is.

Sony has opened the door up to in-game advertising thanks to it's agreement with in-game advertising partner IGA Worldwide. Game publishers and advertising firms will be able to buy and sell ad space within games to reach their target audience of people 18-34 years of age. The advertising will be placed in your typical games, there won't be billboards in Final Fantasy games so don't worry. The first money hungry..er..I mean company to jump on board with this is EA. They will have dynamic advertising any Madden, NBA, NASCAR and NHL games. They will also have advertising in the Burnout series and Need for Speed.

An interesting idea is that these ads can be updated in real-time. You won't see the same, let's say, Pepsi ad on every turn 3 in a NASCAR game, maybe you will see a Sugar Daddy billboard instead the next time you race. That's pretty intriguing.

As for my opinion on it. It's really hard to say. As long as they don't take away from the gaming experience, I'm neither yay or nay for them. But if they start getting so in the way that it's a pain to play video games (such as sometimes the case when I watch TV with so many ads, thank you TiVo for helping me with that annoyance) then we might have a problem. The other thing is, if we are going to get ads in games, can the price-tag for the game come down a bit? This is one thing I never understood about movie ticket prices. Different movie theaters have different prices, but before the movie starts there are so many local ads now-a-days you would think that they could decrease a movie ticket by at least a dollar. But hey, I'm talking to the wind here because the bottom line is money. And the more money you have the more resources you can buy, so I get it.

Ultimately this could be a good thing for the industry. It'll start letting other companies whom have employees that have never picked up a video game controller be sort-of familiar with a game they've never heard of. And in this way the media of video games can start to become a standard medium with TV, Radio, and Internet. And if that happens then video games will get much more exposure and they will have the opportunity to grow.

-Jeremy aka Adridius