As development costs for big-budget video games continue to soar, incorporating product placement akin to movies and TV shows could help bridge the financial gap, according to Mark Darrah, former Dragon Age boss at BioWare.
In a detailed video discussing the future of game monetization, Darrah highlighted the trend of AAA games integrating live-service elements to keep players engaged and spending long after launch. Many titles now rely on post-launch content or live-service models to recoup their massive development budgets, which often run into hundreds of millions of dollars. However, Darrah argued that not every game can succeed with these models, necessitating alternative revenue streams for developers.
"My understanding is the live-action Smurfs movie paid for itself entirely through product placement," Darrah said. "So the movie was effectively made for zero dollars simply through the sale of product placement. Contrast that with the way that games make money."
He also cautioned that subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus aren't a panacea, noting that "a lot of games make very little [money]" from inclusion and that such offerings risk encouraging "degenerative design in order to try to juice the numbers."
"The over-reliance on microtransactions is overemphasizing certain genres and stopping others from flourishing," Darrah added. "Everything can't be a live-service, which is something I hope we've proven pretty definitively over the past year and a half. If monetization is coming predominantly from live-services, we run the risk of living in a world where there are no AAA games that aren't live-services. And I don't think that's a world that any of us want to live in."
Sony has already scaled back its live-service ambitions following the failure of Concord last year, and earlier canceled online versions of The Last of Us and Twisted Metal. Meanwhile, Xbox scrapped an unannounced MMO from ZeniMax Online Studios, the developer behind The Elder Scrolls Online.
"So, is there an opportunity for games to take a step back and think about different ways that we could make money? I think there is," Darrah concluded. "Product placement is a very small part of video games right now compared to movies and television. Maybe it could be a larger part of development. Maybe there are relationships there to be formed."
Darrah spent nearly two decades at BioWare as executive producer on every major Dragon Age game. He previously revealed that the poorly-received Dragon Age: The Veilguard started as a live-service title before being rebooted, though some elements remained. Ironically, the game's commercial failure led publisher EA to suggest it might have performed better with online, shared-world features—a notion vehemently rejected by fans.
Still, it's hard to imagine product placement saving The Veilguard. Could Rook have summoned the Old Spice guy on horseback for the final battle? Chugged a Mountain Dew-flavored Fereldan ale as a power-up? Or donned beskar armor to promote The Mandalorian and Grogu? Maybe a live-service Dragon Age wouldn't have been so bad after all.
Darrah has since left BioWare, which is now solely focused on developing a new Mass Effect game, though a release date remains unannounced.
