This would put less money at risk, as placing major brands inside games could offer real financial support for developers.

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah may have found a solution to the problem of game budgets climbing to unsustainable heights – and it is not simply hoping that a successful live-service game will somehow pay everyone’s salaries. Borrowed from the film industry, this approach essentially points to something creators like Hideo Kojima have already done, and Darrah argues that more creators should consider it. He believes game publishers and developers could help fund their games through product placement, just as we saw from Kojima in Death Stranding, where Monster Energy appeared as a consumable item.

It was later removed in the Director’s Cut version and replaced with a generic brand from the Death Stranding universe, but it was still there when the game originally launched. The game had already sold five million copies well before the Director’s Cut arrived. Another example would be 007 First Light and the Omega watches featured in it. It is easy to imagine an ideal scenario in which developers sell product placement before release, then negotiate post-launch payments if long-term goals are met. That money could help a team finish its project and, alongside game sales, support the creation of the next one.

“My understanding is that the live-action Smurfs movie paid for itself entirely through product placement. So the movie was effectively made for $0 through product placement sales alone” – Darrah said.

This is certainly a better idea than simply hoping that any live-service initiative a studio launches will succeed. Darrah at least believes studios should consider it, since not everything can be live service, something BioWare has made fairly clear over the past year and a half. Darrah spent his career at BioWare, working on almost every one of its projects, from 1998’s Baldur’s Gate, where he served as lead programmer and executive producer, to the studio’s most recent major release, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where he worked as a consultant. In between, he was project director on virtually every BioWare title.

Product placement in games has existed for a long time. Darrah knows the inner workings of game development very well, and the idea is certainly worth considering. That is especially true when the alternative is the kind of mass layoff cycle that keeps tearing through the industry. Would players actually welcome more product placement in games? There are obvious loopholes, such as making a James Bond game, where adding something like an Aston Martin technically fits the story. But that is clearly a narrow lane, and the big question remains whether game companies can strike deals that benefit them without damaging the look and feel of their games.

For product placement to work, such games need to take place, at least to some extent, in a recognizable version of the real world.

Source: WCCFTech