Quake Wars will have in-game ads

Our recent look at Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has certainly been catching some eyes. Quite a few of us, both in the forums and in the office, are getting pretty psyched about the upcoming release. And yesterday, the developer came clean about a little secret - the game will feature in-game advertising, or IGA.

Neil Postlethwaite, Managing Director for Splash Damage, came onto the ET:QW official community site yesterday to make the announcement. In order to bring not just basic bug patches but continuous refinements and improvements to what the company hopes will be a long-standing multiplayer experience, the developer has gone the route of IGA.

"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," Neil said in his post.

In his comments, he also made sure to cover privacy concerns regarding the advertising. "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." Whether that will be enough to quell the privacy critics or not has yet to be seen, but at least the comments so far have been largely positive.

For anyone who will be toying around with the upcoming beta, you'll get the chance to see the ads in action - they have already been successfully included, so there aren't going to be a lot of surprises between the beta and final release.

In the meantime, take a step into our forums and shoot off a few rounds on Quake Wars, in-game ads, and the merging of the two.