You know when you're in the middle of watching a great show or movie on live TV and you have to cut away from the action to watch five minutes of adverts for products you don't give a single crap about? You know how much that annoys you, yeah? Great! Now imagine that happening while you're playing video games that you've paid £70 for.
According to a recent report from Axios (via Kotaku), a company with the super-cool and not entirely awful name playerWON has signed a deal with companies like EA to find a way to bring TV-style adverts to console games. Uh oh.
Can you imagine playing a game like Battlefield 2042 later this year and seeing other players get special treatment because they watched an advert? It's super gross.
playerWON describes itself a "a first-of-its-kind in-game advertising platform," and have apparently been testing out their ad-based technology for over a year now. The company feels its now ready to implement/inflict its vision in actual console games. The one very small upside of this idea is that the ads apparently aren't designed to interrupt you in the middle of a game. Instead, you would choose to watch an advert and the game would then "release rewards to the player". Ew. Ew ew ew ew.
Advert
The aforementioned testing took place in the free-to-play battle arena game Smite last year, with predictably gross results. Data from this experiment showed that players were 22% more likely to play a game and spend money in that game (11%) if they watched in-game ads that granted access to special perks.
Emboldened by this success, playerWON "plans to launch in-game ads in roughly a dozen more games by the year's end". I do not see this ending well. For us, I mean. The people behind this are clearly about to get very rich.
Featured Image Credit: EA