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.
<social>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyf7ErwlNUY</social>
"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?