Bartlett: â??Developers donâ??t plan enough for advertisingâ??

In an interview with developmag.com, IGA Worldwide’s Ed Bartlett has reiterated the need for forward planning when developers implement advertising into games.

“We do still get a lot of people who come in and say ‘We’ve got three weeks left until master, can we throw some ads in?’ and it just doesn’t work like that,” he said.

“The planning process, locating the ads, the way the level design process works these days means there’d be a lot of re-exporting, re-lighting and pre-calculation, collision detection, that kind of stuff. You just can’t do that at such a late stage.”

Also, he says, don’t be worried the advertising agencies will want to plaster every vertical surface of your game with ads: “You’ve got to be very careful of the consumer at the end of the day, because that’s our focus.

“The brand wants the best impression on the consumer and so does the publisher, so we’re no going to do anything that affects that impression or we wouldn’t have a business.”

The full interview, in which Bartlett discusses using advertising revenue to self-fund development of games and the full control that developers and publishers have over adverts, can be found here.