Recent reports from Business Insider indicate that both Sony and Microsoft are looking into further monetising free-to-play games on their respective platforms through in-game advertising.
Reported last week (paywalled article), Business Insider says that Microsoft is currently testing ways to insert ads into F2P games, but does have concerns about the reaction of its player base as previous efforts to do so have been met with fairly wide backlash. The company is also keeping privacy in mind and doesn’t currently have plans to allow any kind of tracking or user information to be sent back to advertising agencies.
Microsoft also doesn’t plan to take any cut of ad revenue, instead sharing it completely with the advertising agency and game developer, according to the report, which also states that the company plans to launch in Q3 2022.
More recently, Business Insider also published a similar report concerning PlayStation (also paywalled), with Sony seemingly looking at a similar concept for F2P games on its own platform.
Similar to Microsoft’s plan, Sony’s idea for in-game advertising largely focusses around unintrusive methods like in-game billboards on racetracks or sports stadiums, but the company is reportedly also looking at rewarding players for watching ad rolls in a similar manner to a lot of F2P mobile games.
Sony supposedly hasn’t decided yet if it would take a cut of advertising revenue in this new system or portion it entirely to the developer and agency as with Microsoft’s proposal.
Obviously this isn’t super surprising news, in fact it seems almost inevitable, but it’ll no doubt raise concerns of just how much penetration advertising might have in games as time goes on and whether or not they’ll begin to interrupt the experiences we’re accustomed to. It seems as though we’ll have an answer to that as early as this year, though.
