BioWare veteran reveals money-making strategy video games should steal from movies

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah, who worked heavily with the Dragon Age series, believes that to avoid all AAA games soon becoming live-service, developers and publishers should steal a money-making idea from the movie industry. Particularly, gaming should borrow the concept of product placement.

"Product placement is a really small part of video games right now, compared to movies and television," Darrah explains in a video on his YouTube channel (via GamesRadar+). He believes that it could establish relationships between game companies and wider products, potentially leading to strong revenue streams without relying solely on charging the player extra for cosmetics or DLCs.

"I think that the over reliance on microtransactions is overemphasizing certain genres and preventing other genres from flourishing. So is it worth a think? I think that it is. Do I have a great model? I don't. Not yet. But it's something the industry should be considering because everything can't be a live service as we've, I hope, proven quite definitively over the last year and a half. And if our monetization is coming primarily from live services, we run the risk of ending up in a world where there are no AAA games that aren't live services," Darrah said.

It may still feel like right now we get a lot of AAA live-service games shoved at us, but recent flops have hopefully shown a lot of big publishers they can't just make millions by throwing a bunch of keywords together and releasing it as the latest hero shooter of the month. Product placement does sound like one way to make a good bit of cash, but we do see deals with games and products already, just usually outside of the gaming space.

What do you think of Darrah's plan?