"It's expensive when you try to make the game longer, more exciting and introduce new technologies," said Jeffrey Dickstein, strategic sales and licensing manager for Ubisoft. "But we need to do it to stay competitive."
Other video game makers, however, are concerned that adding advertisements to their creations will alienate customers used to escaping into science-fictional and Tolkien-esque digital worlds far from the reach of Madison Avenue.
"We're not going to paint a Nike swoosh on the side of the castle of Qeynos," said Chris Kramer, a spokesman for Sony Online Entertainment Inc., the publisher of EverQuest, an Internet-based game set in a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world. "That's the sort of thing that would really turn off the player."
Indeed, Funcom's Perkins recalled a complaint by a player who said he could understand that advertising would exist in the futuristic world of Anarchy Online, but wondered, "How can you say Motley Crue will be around 30,000 years from now?"
Some avid gamers also are growing concerned that arrangements between publishers and advertisers are changing their beloved hobby. They worry that the pursuit of advertising dollars could ultimately influence the decisions on which games are developed, forcing game makers to set more titles in the present instead of the type of surreal worlds for which the industry has become famous.
"I don't want to imagine the day when prospective future Marios, Zeldas and Grim Fandangos are brushed aside for numerous clones of Splinter Cell, SWAT and NFS Underground, just to squeeze in a little more advertising space," said Rahul Chacko, a 24-year-old graphic artist from India.
Gamers' concerns aside, Sony did partner with Pizza Hut on a promotion that allowed EverQuest players to type the command "/pizza" while playing the game to order a pizza over the Internet, Kramer said. The company also felt it was appropriate, he added, to sign up with Massive Inc., a New York-based ad agency, to run ads in its futuristic game PlanetSide.
Massive is establishing a network of video game titles, offering advertisers an aggregate audience across multiple games. Once Massive's software is integrated in a video game, ads can be switched in and out of a title played on computers and consoles with an Internet connection without having to shut down the game or requiring players to download a patch.
