TV-style commercials will soon attack your console gaming experience

Ads have been continually taking over our digital lives. From the annoying non-skippable ones on YouTube or mobile games to Oculus Quest’s plans to integrate them, there’s no escaping ads, and it seems the console gaming scene is next in line to experience the dread.

According to Axios, a company called playerWON – described as “a first-of-its-kind in-game advertising platform – has signed deals with companies such as EA and Hi-Rez to try and bring TV-style commercials to their games.

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PlayerWON has reportedly tested this tech for over a year and seems to be confident of bringing it over to its customers. Instead of just beaming videos in the middle of a game, players will be able to view an ad and when servers detect that the commercial has been viewed in its entirety, it will then “release rewards to the player”.

The company explained that taking a traditional and cheaper marketing method will turn away the young audience. Hence, the upcoming tech will only be licensed out to game developers so it could be implemented within the game itself, unlike the ads we already see on our system menu screens.

The testing has been taking place inside Smite, and to nobody’s surprise, the results are as awful as one would expect:

Data from one of Simulmedia’s pilot campaigns with Smite, a F2P multiplayer battle arena game from Tencent’s Hi-Rez Studios, shows that players were much more likely (22 per cent) to play a game and spend money within the game (11 per cent), if they watched in-game ads that gave them access to more gaming perks.

As such, playerWON’s plan to launch in-game ads is on its way to roughly a dozen more games by the end of the year, so enjoy your commercial-free console gaming experience while you can.