According to Business Insider reports, Microsoft is developing a program that could allow Ad insertion in free-to-play games, to allow additional revenue channels for developers. It’s a system that can give Xbox an advantage over Sony’s Playstation and even Amazon’s Twitch, for some analysts.
The objective, as reported in the analysis of the American newspaper, would be precisely to guarantee other monetization possibilities for developers and publishers, who could thus obtain additional resources by selling advertising spaces within free-to-play games are distributed free of charge.
It seems to be a system of placing advertisements directly inside the game, in a so to speak “diegetic” context: for example, in a racing game we could find real billboards of companies that paid to insert such promotional references.
It’s not the first time such an idea and previous attempts have come up, to be honest, as the idea of in-game advertising has been around for years. However, the previous examples were not very well received by players (among the most recent also the billboards present in Battlefield 2042). For this reason, Microsoft would have known about the issue and therefore would have evaluated the potential negative response from users, however it seems that the program is still in progress and could find applications in the future in some free-to-play games.
The idea is that it could be a kind of “private market”, dedicated only to a few specific brands that become part of the circuit, even if it is not clear how this should work. Microsoft neither confirmed nor denied the matter, only vaguely commenting: “We are always looking for ways to improve the experience for players and developers, but we have nothing to share at the moment”.
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