2. More In-Game Advertising
Here's one that has been a long time in the making, and it's slowly being teased more and more by developers every day. It's shocking how many games you'll play - specifically sport and racing games - that have in-game advertising, be it on billboards or as grandiose sponsorship deals you can't help but notice. Remember the outrage around Doritos and Mountain Dew products granting Call of Duty players more XP? Well, that's probably going to get a whole lot worse in the next generation. Though that sort of incentivised commoditisation is a big part of the problem, it's actual in-game advertising that proves the most worrying, because it can in its worst instances interrupt our engagement with the game, all the more if the adverts update periodically to reflect current trends. Essentially, there will be a breaking point for gamers, but we imagine it's a long way off, and developers are only going to stop doing it once it gets to the point that the advertising revenue is not able to compete with the revenue lost through turning gamers off with this practise. We already pay £40 per game; is that really not enough for them to not shove more material down our throat?