Quake Wars lands in-game ads

The highly anticipated multiplayer first-person shooter Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be the latest title to utilise in-game advertising, Splash Damage's managing director Neil Postlethwaite has said on his developer blog.

The game, which has been in production for four years, is due for release on August 1. As an exclusively multiplayer game, the title will need funds for support after release--to maintain the servers and the community site, and to provide updates and improvements, explains Postlethwaite.

"To help cover this level of on-going support without passing the costs on to the gamer, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will feature appropriate advertisements in select locations of our levels," he said.

According to Postlethwaite, these ads will not be intrusive, nor will the ad system collect personal information or data of gamers. The executive added, "You won't have to interact with them; they'll just be part of the normal environment. In fact, there are some places it's quite odd not to have an advertisement--the sides of container trucks, for example. Great care is being taken to ensure that all our ads are appropriate for the game world and we have absolute approval rights in this area. If it's not appropriate or it's distracting, it won't go in."

Postlethwaite did not identify the company that Splash Damage would be using to provide the in-game ads. The executive concluded his blog post by saying that it was not a decision that had been made lightly, and that he hoped by making it the company would be able to provide a "higher level of ongoing support" that it would have otherwise been able to.

Other games that have featured in-game ads include Battlefield 2142, the FIFA game series, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.