Today's round-up includes news of a World Of WarCraft board game, as well as commentary on the size of the market for advertising in games, plus info on the new Question Of The Week responses, fresh product news, and newly posted jobs.
- Fantasy Flight Games announced that it has signed a deal with Blizzard to produce a board game based on World of WarCraft, Blizzard's fantastically successful MMORPG. Not much is known about the game, or how it will translate the MMORPG experience to a tabletop game with only a few players, but Fantasy Flight is promising that the game will be "epic" in scope, using over 200 figures based on more than 25 models. Fantasy Flight will release the World of WarCraft board game in fall 2005.
- A study by survey company Yankee Group predicts that game-related advertising, as recently seen in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, will be a $800 million market by 2009, up from its size of $120 million in 2004. Mitch Davis, CEO of in-game advertising placement company Massive Inc., supported the study with his own prediction that the income game-related advertising would reach $1 billion by 2010. The Yankee Group study further indicated that one-third of the revenue will likely come from advergaming projects, rather than product placement or sponsorship within retail games.
- Also updated on Gamasutra today (free reg. req.): our major feature consists of the latest Question Of The Week answers, discussing responses to the simple question: "For any genre of your choice, what is the game that defines that genre for you?" In addition, there is also product news discussing the release of BigWorld's latest MMO middleware, and there are newly advertised jobs from Artificial Mind & Movement, Concrete Games/THQ, Electronic Arts, Forterra Systems, Nelson Staffing Solutions, Rockstar North, SCEA, and WagerWorks.
