According to Red Herring, Google has agreed to acquire Adscape Media for $23 million. Adscape is an in game advertising company (according to their website they do “Real advertising in the virtual world”). Combine this with Microsoft buying their own gaming ad firm and it seems like there’s a good chance that we are going to be seeing a whole lot of ads in videogames for the near future.
Of course the fact that I said the “near future” is no accident. While there may not be much consol gamers can do to block ads in games, PC gamers certainly will figure out how to do it. You can already block ads on your browser so why would ads in your games be any different? While the near future may suck for gaming, I see this as little more than the popup and banner ad boom of 90s. If they can crack the copy protection on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I’m sure they can figure out how to block ads in my games.