Eckert: In-game advertising could cost creativity

The games industry faces losing creativity if it becomes dependant on in-game advertising, according to Todd Eckert, director of North America for Eutechnyx.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Eckert said how he believed the industry needed to monetise games while moving to a free-to-play online model.

"It's a tricky spot because music never figured out how to take the economic realities of streaming music in a shareable world and make it work for the industry," Eckert commented. "It was exacerbated by the fact that the traditional powers in that industry fought for so long that they also alienated all the people that loved them too."

"I think it's very important that, as games maybe move from traditional console models to online models, people figure out how to not only work with the technological realities of what the public wants but also to recognise that if people can't make any money on games then they can't make them. It's up to us, all of us, to figure out how to do this."

However, the former movie producer warned that relying on advertising could lead to the games industry inheriting all the problems of television.

"You can go to the early days of television in the US; television wound up being sponsored by advertising... The problem was that advertisers would say you had one primary sponsor of whatever the television show was. They would say: 'Alright we're your sponsor, you're going to run the script by us every week and you're going to tell us who is on. If we have any potential problem with that person or that content we'll simply stop sponsoring the show,'" he explained.

"What that did was it took a lot of creativity out of television because it became so focused on the money as opposed to the content. I would hate to see that happen to games."

Todd Eckhart and Darren Jobling's full interview with GamesIndustry.biz can be read here.