Mobile Entertainment

What's even more interesting is that EA has 'reduxed' one of its existing multiplayer first-person shooter franchises - Battlefield - by swapping polygons for cartoon-style graphics and hard as nails hair trigger gameplay for a more laid back experience.

The objective? To makes online games more accessible and thus widen the audience beyond the hardcore.

Sound familiar? It's pretty much what everyone's talking about right now in the world of mobile games - how ad-funding might help grow the market beyond the five per cent that currently pay to download games.

EA's move is a bold one. Not least because it's own track record in online gaming is a mixed bag - casual site Pogo.com is successful, but a few years back the company famously and massively over-estimated the contributions 'new media' would be making to its bottom line, while forays into massively multiplayer paid games have been disastrous - think The Sims Online.

Secondly, ad-funded gaming is a well trodden concept in PC/console gaming, but one that no-one has really been able to make work. Why? Because ad campaigns have short lead times and are fast moving. Game development is neither of those things.

Put simply, it's not practical to start talking about product placement and in-game ads when the game isn't going to be in stores for another 18 months. But the rise of broadband and mass-market connected services like Xbox Live are changing all that - games can be served ads dynamically and in real time.

But wait a minute - mobile phones can already do that, right? They certainly can and mobile games already have the volumes that advertisers crave. Publishers like Gamevil know this and companies like innerActive, Amobee, Ad-Infuse and Actionaility are helping them exploit the oppotunity.

Sure, there are issues to work through - both technical and economical. Some say ad-funded games (mobile or PC/console) will cannibalise paid downloads/boxed product. Others argue that ad-funding could actually grow the premium market by enabling publishers to offer 'free' back-catalogue games that plug new releases, for example.

EA and its peers have waited 25 years to evolve their business models beyond shifting boxes. In mobile, it seems we're spoiled for choice. We must choose wisely.