14 DAY TRIAL // Massive Inc., the in game advertising firm owned by Microsoft, has entered into an agreement with both Activision and Blizzard in order to have advertisement featured on the official sites of the publishers and in the videogames they publish.
Massive points out that Activision has already benefited from its services for games like Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, with 330 campaigns developed and 225 advertisers interested in the services.
Now, 18 games for both the PC and the Xbox 360 will be targeted, like Guitar Hero: World Tour, Quantum of Solace, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, AMAX Racing and the upcoming Tony Hawk.
A similar deal has been agreed with Blizzard regarding advertising on the sites related to World of Warcraft and on the Battle.net online gaming service owned by the company. Paul Sams, the Chief Operations Officer of Blizzard, said that “Massive understands and respects our stance against advertising that might detract from gameplay or offend our players” to justify why there will be no in game ads in the MMO itself.
J.J. Richards, the general manager at the Advertiser and Publisher Solution division of Microsoft, is said to be in charge of the collaboration with Massive. He has also been the general manager of Xbox Live. He said that “I have been closely involved with Massive for the past couple of years and have seen the amazing growth firsthand. I'm stepping into this role at a great time for Microsoft and the advertising and gaming industry, and look forward to working with our publishers to create in- and around-game advertising opportunities for any advertiser's media plan”.
So, look around a bit when playing Quantum of Solace and Guitar Hero and you might just see suggestions regarding stuff you can spend your cash on.