Videogame analyst Matthew Ball predicted in his "State of Videogaming in 2026" report released earlier this year that in-game ad placements will become more common in PC and console games and services in the future, as they're a largely untapped source of revenue—income the industry needs and is increasingly struggling to find. Now he's the newly-hired chief strategy officer for Xbox, and in an interview with The Game Business, he says he hasn't changed his mind.
Ball said the issue is a "two-sided problem": The cost of making games keeps going up, particularly on the big-budget side of the street where Microsoft lives, and so is the cost of the hardware on which those games are played. All of that ultimately lands in the lap of consumers, who are eventually forced to reduce or stop spending money on games—and that's bad for the game companies in turn, because without consumer spending, growth stops, and growth is the core pillar of the economic system we've decided is best.
