Advertisement in Games?

In all around entertainment businesses, advertisement is the main income and marketing tools for the companies. Because of the large audience of the entertainment industries, many companies choose them for marketing their products or services. This type of business is common especially in the music and movie industry and we can see the sign of the branding and marketing of the products inside the game industry as well.

However, there is a big difference between other entertainment industries and the game industry in regard of advertising. Most of advertisement and marketing tools aren't fond by the audience. Most of the audience try to avoid the advertisement rather than listen or watch. On the other hand in game industry, advertisement adds realism into the game which is highly demanded by the audience.

Most of the in-game advertisements are brand names who are the sponsors of the sport teams like brand name of the sponsors on the jerseys. Because of that reason, most of the in-game advertisements are for sport genre. Madden, NHL and NBA2K franchises are the best example. However we can see other brands name in racing and simulations as well.

It's hard to say that we can encounter any advertisement in RPG games. Because most of the RPG game have a concept of medieval fantasy and this concept hardly open an environment of marketing.

Screenshot sources:
http://img810.imageshack.us/f/ajie.jpg/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ea-sports-game-gatorade.jpg
http://www.testdriveunlimited2z.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Test-Drive-Unlimited-2-tdu211.jpg