How In-Game Ads Set Battlefield Free

EA takes a page out of Valve's book with a new-look Battlefield game available for free this summer.

If you're between 18 and 34 years old then you're in what marketing people like to call their key demographic. You and your peers are the people advertisers are spending billions of dollars a year to reach, hoping that you'll latch onto the brands they're pushing.

Unfortunately for these firms, this demographic is also the group that is starting to shy away from traditional advertising media such as TV and newspapers and is turning instead to the internet and video games for news and entertainment. But the ad crowd isn't giving up that easily.

One of the big issues facing games in 2008 will be how the worlds of advertising and games come together. The specific details of how best to incorporate ads into games in ways that will not distract from the gaming experience while still fulfilling the needs of advertisers are still be worked out. What's inevitable, though, is that the mash-up is going to happen.

In 2005, spending on in-game ads in the US (where the most data is available) was in the tens of millions of dollars, but there are several companies betting heavily that over the course of the next five years, that number will swell into the billions.

Mitch Davis, the head of Massive Incorporated, one of the new firms built around the idea of maximizing the potential of in-game advertising, said in 2006 that spending on ads in games could reach $1.8 billion in the US alone by 2010, according to an AdWeek report.

Considered next to the $168 billion that is forecast for all ad spending in the US in 2008 or the $478 billion that will be spent worldwide, that's a miniscule amount, but the numbers are significant enough that video game publishers and specialist advertising firms alike are starting to pay careful attention to in-game ads.

EA is one of the companies that appears to be coming around. In 2005, at the Advertising in Games West conference held in San Francisco, EA's Julie Shumaker said that in-game advertising wasn't close to real yet, according to a Gamasutra report from the event.

Shumaker, who left EA in 2006 for in-game ad company Double Fusion, said at the time that EA was more interested in bringing in money for the company than in using any money earned to bring down the actual cost of game development.

These days, EA is looking at ads as a way to support exposure of its products. The company has recently announced that it is working on a spin-off of one of its most popular franchises that will be given away for free.

At the Digital, Life, Design Conference, being held this week in Munich, EA announced Battlefield Heroes, a spin-off of Swedish developer DICE's popular first-person shooter series Battlefield.

While realism is a key component of the rest of the games in the franchise, Battlefield Heroes, which is also being developed by DICE, will differ from its stablemates by combining the shooter action with a cartoon-inspired look reminiscent of Valve's revamp of the Team Fortress series in last year's Team Fortress 2.

Battlefield Heroes will be offered to PC owners this summer as a free download as part of EA's Play 4 Free program - a first for EA. This has been made possible by EA's use of a new business model that relies on both in-game advertising and microtransactions.

Battlefield Heroes on the cover of Games For Windows magazine

An important question is whether the game will retain the elements that made previous Battlefield games so popular. By its own admission, EA is casting much more widely for an audience for Battlefield Heroes, a tactic demanded by the business model the game is based on.

As such, Battlefield Heroes has been designed to be much more accessible, opening up the formula to the much larger audience of PC owners who have not played a Battlefield game.

Developer DICE says there will be something for everyone in Battlefield Heroes, which the team is hoping to support with a stream of new content.

"As a game developer," says EA DICE's Ben Cousins, "it is such a cool new way to make games."

For gamers, though, the game will serve as yet another sign that the mix of advertising and games is one that is here to stay.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo