Former BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has weighed in with his thoughts on what the AAA video game business can do to make more money and become more sustainable: sell product placement.
In a video on his YouTube channel, Darrah said the fascination with live-service games and “over-reliance on microtransactions” is stopping other genres from flourishing. Development budgets keep going up and up, and without an increase to the current $70 going rate for new releases, developers could look to product placement to help make money, Darrah said.
He said the live-action Smurfs movie “paid for itself entirely through product placement,” and he wonders if product placement could become a bigger deal for games.
“So, is there an opportunity for games to take a step back and think about different ways that we could make money? I think there is,” Darrah said. “Product placement is a very small part of video games right now compared to movies and television. Maybe it could be a larger part of development. Maybe there are relationships there to be formed.”
Product placement in video games does already exist, and a recent high-profile example was 007 First Light, which featured many famous real-world brands just like the movies do. The game’s budget is unknown, but a recent report said it was the most expensive piece of entertainment ever made in Denmark.
Mario Kart 8, meanwhile, featured a Mercedes-Benz partnership, while Alan Wake had Verizon and Energizer in-game product placement. Death Stranding featured Monster Energy drinks in the game.
Beyond product placement opportunities, a Bank of America stock analyst has said GTA 6 should cost $80 to help encourage other companies to raise prices to help with the sustainability issue.
Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick said major new releases have actually come down in price over the years when you consider how inflation has affected pretty much everything else you buy these days. Games have held steady in the $60-$70 range for 10 years, and that “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” according to Zelnick.
“Everything can’t be a live-service”
Darrah went on to say that no one wants to see a video game industry dominated by live-service games.
“Everything can’t be a live-service, which is something I hope we’ve proven pretty definitively over the past year and a half, and if monetization is coming predominantly from live-services, we run the risk of living in a world where there are no AAA games that aren’t live-services. And I don’t think that’s a world that any of us want to live in,” he said.
Also during the video, Darrah said PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass are not doing all that much for developers in terms of money, and that developers taking deals to come to either program could encourage “degenerative design in order to try to juice the numbers.”
