Live ads coming to video games? You bet!

Over the weekend, I received a story by email from someone about video games that in the near future will feature live streaming video of commercials. I thought it was an interesting news item so here it is for those of you who may not have heard about it and are interested.

It's interesting because I think most of us want to watch as few ads as possible - unless they're really compelling or clever (the Geico spots immediately come to mind). We videotape programs, then fast forward through the commercials or use that time to go do a quick errand in the house or run to the restroom. But most of us certainly don't pay as much attention to the commercials as advertisers probably wish we would.

Still, we can't get away from them, and because advertisers no longer have a captive audience with the TV viewers - for the very reason mentioned above - they are finding other, more enterprising ways to hawk their products. When we buy or rent a video, it has other movies previewed up front. These are commercials in and of themselves. When we go to the movies, there the commercials are, right before the 10 minutes of previews. We go to many places on the Internet and the ads pop up at us, unless we have the pop-up blocker turned on. In that case, it's true we don't have to see the ad but we also don't get to see the material we tried accessing in the first place.

Indeed, advertising is everywhere and now it appears it will be on certain video games as well. I'm sure few will mind as long as they can fast forward or skip over them. But for anyone paying $50 or more for a video game, I doubt too many people are going to be happy to see more ads if they can't skip them somehow.