You don’t need to worry about pixies hawking Diet Pepsi or having to watch action heroes put on Axe deodorant. Google intends to address ads in video games in a different way, and according to new reports, it intends to do so starting this month.
“Google is going to embed 15-second, ‘video-type’ pre-roll and mid-roll ads in some of Bunchball’s casual games,” according to Om Malik. That seems reasonable enough. Google’s plans for the future appear to offer gamers a better deal, though, in terms of comparing the amount of advertising to the quality of the game.
“The second step in Google’s game-focused advertising strategy will take place in December, when the company will, I’m told, will offer an ad-supported version of the PC game Psychonauts,” Malik later continued. “This will be a downloadable game and will have 30-second pre- and mid-roll video ads, according to my sources.”
Malik goes on to give a bit of information about Psychonauts and link to its Wikipedia entry. The detail and length of that entry – and the extremely positive reviews that are mentioned towards the bottom – indicate that this could be a great game for Google to stake part of its reputation on.
Assuming everything moves ahead on schedule, it won’t be too long before we find out if that’s the case.
