As big budget video game development gets more costly, including TV and movie-style product placement could help make up the shortfall, BioWare’s former Dragon Age boss Mark Darrah has said.
In a lengthy video discussing the future of video game monetization, Darrah noted the rise of AAA games including live-service elements to ensure owners kept playing — and paying — long after release.
Many video games rely on post-launch content or live-service elements to ensure projects earn back the huge sums of money spent developing them in the first place, with big budget games now regularly costing hundreds of millions to make. But not every game can succeed with these models, Darrah said, meaning that there needed to be other ways for developers to pay the bills.
“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.”
The existence of subscription programs such as Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus was not a cure-all either, he continued, noting that “a lot of games make very little [money]” from being included, and suggesting that these offerings risked 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 noted. “Everything can’t be a live-service, which is something I hope we’ve proven pretty definitively over the past year and a half, and 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 pulled back significantly on its previous live-action service game plans, partly due to the failure of last year’s Concord, but even prior to that when it scrapped online The Last of Us and Twisted Metal games. Meanwhile, Xbox cancelled an unannounced MMO from ZeniMax Online Studios, the maker of 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 served as executive producer on every major Dragon Age game at BioWare over a career lasting nearly two decades. Previously, he’s discussed how the poorly-received Dragon Age: The Veilguard began life as a live-service game before being rebooted — even if some elements from this version of the project remained. Ironically, The Veilguard’s commercial failure prompted publisher EA to suggest it might have fared better if it had featured online, shared-world features after all — something that fans of the franchise vehemently disagreed with.
Still, it’s hard to imagine The Veilguard being saved with product placement — or suggest what could have been included as possible options. Maybe Rook could have called in the guy on the horse from the Old Spice adverts for the final battle? Or chugged down on a refreshing Mountain Dew-flavoured Fereldan ale as a power up? Or dressed in beskar battle armor to help promote The Mandalorian and Grogu? Maybe a live-service Dragon Age wouldn’t have been so bad after all.
Darrah has now left BioWare, but the studio continues on — solely focused on making a fresh Mass Effect game, which still lacks a release date.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
