Encore une nouvelle qui ne fait que confirmer la conjoncture actuelle (chez THQ et Google, dans Huxley, BF2142 et CS) : Splash Damage annonce que pour rentabiliser les frais de maintenance et de maintient des infrastructures à long terme dans Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, des publicités seront insérées « de façon appropriée ».

Ils essaient de nous rassurer en précisant que si une publicité est intrusive ou trop dérangeante, elle ne sera pas insérée dans les cartes. Rassuré ? De toute façon, comme Splash l'indique, c'était ça ou transférer les frais aux joueurs, par exemple en augmentant le prix du jeu.

L'annonce officielle :

Hi, I'm Neil Postlethwaite, Splash Damage's Managing Director and one of the Producers on Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars. I'd like to talk to you today about the in-game advertising we have in ETQW.

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. The ads aren't intrusive and you won't have to interact with them; they'll just be part of the normal environment. In fact, there are some places it's quite odd not to have an advertisement - the sides of container trucks, for example. 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.

For those of you participating in the upcoming beta, you will get a chance to see them for yourself very soon. And of course we will be releasing a demo prior to the retail launch of the game so everyone can check them out first.

Choosing to place ads in Enemy Territory was not a decision we made lightly. However, in doing so we hope to be able to provide a higher level of on-going support to the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars community than would have been possible otherwise.