Sony wants to adjust the advertising rates for the PlayStation Network game Pain based on how many people are playing at any given moment.
Though that sounds like common sense, it's not exactly current practice. Charging for ads in games traditionally requires a bit of crystal ball-gazing, as they're based in part on projected sales.
What Sony is proposing is to adjust ad rates based on what a game is actually doing, not on what it might do. In other words, if more people are playing, the rate goes up; if nobody's bothering, the rates go down.
In Pain, ads would run on billboards that are seen as you hurtle through the air--billboards that could be changed, pardon the pun, on the fly. When Pain launched, the ads were either fakes or were Sony-related, but Sony hopes to have 20 games with similar dynamic advertising in place by the end of next year.
Nielsen Games, a division of Nielsen Media Research, would be in charge of keeping track of the numbers, including how many people are playing and what ads are being seen. Nielsen's GameMetrics currently tracks how many people are playing what games on which consoles, but this would be the first time the company could see "inside the game," so to speak.
