Splash Damage: ‘In-game ads fund customer support’

Speaking via the game’s official blog, the UK team behind Enemy Territory Quake Wars have been justifying their choice for in-game ads, explaining to players that they help pay for customer service.

Neil Postlethwaite, MD and one of the producers, commented: "For the last four years, we’ve put all of our effort into making Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars. So, we’re not planning to ship this game and walk away. We want to keep supporting ETQW in as many ways as possible. We’ll be maintaining the persistent stats servers and the community site, and continuing to support ETQW with updates and improvements.

"To help cover this level of on-going support without passing the costs on to the gamer, ETQW will feature appropriate advertisements in select locations of our levels."

He also took the opportunity to allay player features over metrics gathered about the ads and their in-game relevance:

"Great care is being taken to ensure that all our ads are appropriate for the game world and we have absolute approval rights in this area. If it’s not appropriate or it’s distracting, it won’t go in.

"The company providing the ad system does not and will not store any personal information or data that otherwise can be used to identify you. All they track is if and how long you look at the advertisements."