Ah yes, the always enjoyable battle for the “hearts and minds” of gamers continues. This time around the efforts are on the behalf of IGA Worldwide.

European publisher relations VP and co-founder Ed Bartlett was in attendance at the Edinburgh International Festival this past week, and made some very pointed remarks about IGA stating that “We are not spyware” and that “We’re not evil”. He also said that “I used to be a game developer, so I’m not a big evil corporate guy”.

Will gamers listen? We certainly hope so, and IGA probably does too.

Via Gamasutra.

IGA Worldwide is going to be delivering the in-game advertising for a free first person shooter titled Rising Eagle. The game, developed by Invasion Interactive, is available to PC users via a free download on the Rising Eagle website. To date the game has been downloaded 103,385 times, which isn’t too much of a surprise considering mankind’s love of “free”. Ed Bartlett, VP Publisher Relations – Europe of IGA Worldwide calls this model of ad supported games the “freemium” model. As the amount of money allocated towards in-game advertising increases we can expect to see an increase in the number of “freemium” games.

Rising Eagle has the majority of its combat based in urban environments, as seen in this shot from Paris below. This no doubt will allow for some great placement for brands within the game.

For more details check out the press release here.

In case you missed it yesterday, there was a very promising report released on behalf of Nielsen Games and IGA Worldwide. The report details the findings of a study performed by Nielsen on the reactions of gamers to dynamic in-game advertising. The primary finding of this study was that 82% of gamers react positively to contextual in-game ads and that there is no loss of enjoyment when playing a game with in-game ads.

Gamasutra has a nice little write up here if you are looking for some more specifics.

The Nielsen/IGA Worldwide study further reinforces the findings of the Massive Inc/Interpret LLC study that was released back on June 3rd. Both of these studies will more than likely deliver some much needed reassurance to game developers worldwide as they debate whether or not begin further integration of in-game advertising into their revenue models.

If anything, these studies may at least help take some of the sting off of the painful memories around the release of Battlefield 2142 and the backlash related to EA’s release of that game two years ago complete with in-game advertising. I think for any developer contemplating the integration of ads into one of their titles, the controversy surrounding Battlefield 2142 comes to mind.