Dragon Age series producer says more games should be funded by product placement instead of live service

Bioware veteran and Dragon Age series producer Mark Darrah says some studios and publishers should consider turning to product placement instead of relying on microtransactions to fund development.

In a video on his personal YouTube channel, Darrah – who was at BioWare for 23 years and was executive producer on the Dragon Age series – suggested that while video games aren’t the same medium as movies, they could still borrow their business models more frequently to fund project development.

“My understanding is the live-action Smurfs movie paid for itself entirely through product placement,” Darrah claimed, “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.”

Darrah noted that while many games are funded not only by the initial retail price but also by a combination of DLC, live service microtransactions and season pass-style subscriptions, this service models suits some game genres better than others.

“The advantage of [free-to-play] with microtransactions is the barrier is incredibly low,” he said. “The amount of money you could make can actually be very large, it can actually be a massive amount of money, but you’re going to have a lot of people playing your game for free, making none of your money.

“So what tends to happen is the game tends to shift its focus from caring about all the players to mostly caring about the people that are actually generating revenue.”

Darrah went on to suggest that while being featured on a subscription service such as Xbox Game Pass may provide some sort of regular income, it doesn’t necessarily replace the live service model and may in fact encourage it because some subscription services pay studios based on player engagement.

“I guess one problem with the game subscription model is that it does have some perverse incentives to encourage not necessarily player-friendly design in order to optimize for the thing you’re getting paid for,” he said.

“If I know I’m getting paid for number of session days – literally the number of different days during which a player logs into my game for any amount of time – I can design my game to optimize for that, even though it might make the experience for the player worse. Even though it might cause people to turn out of my game sooner, to enjoy my game less, to play it for less total minutes, I can optimize to push up the number that I’m being measured against.

“And typically you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to have these perverse incentives that are causing design to work against player experience. Though […] I would argue that the entire live service microtransaction model is exactly that. It is entirely designed around putting monetization ahead of player experience in order to make more money. I can’t think of anything in movies that matches the live service microtransaction model.”

With the total player base being a finite size, Darrah noted that not every game that relies on live service or player engagement to earn money will be successful, and that more studios should consider other models such as product placement – not only because it could provide more financial security, but because it could also strengthen some genres that traditionally don’t fit into the live service model well enough.

“The way that we currently have subscriptions set up, they don’t tend to make very much money for most games that are on those services,” he explained. “Some games make a bunch, a lot of games make very little, and it encourages degenerative design in order to try to juice the numbers and make yourself more money.

“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. 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. Maybe we need to change the way that games go into subscription services. Maybe it’s not forever. Maybe they go in for a while and then they leave the same way that movies leave Netflix.

“I think that the over-reliance on microtransactions is overemphasizing certain genres and preventing other genres from flourishing. So, is it worth a think? I would say that it is. Do I have a great answer? Do I have a great model? I don’t. Not yet. But it’s something I think the industry should be considering because, everything can’t be a live service, as we’ve – I hope – proven pretty definitively over the last year and a half.

“And if our monetization is coming primarily from live services, we run the risk of ending up 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 really want to live in.”