This is awesome. I want to see more of this. In-game advertising is a wonderful concept when utilized properly- my gripe has always been that the companies want to have advertising AND sell at full price.
Ubisoft released some ad-supported games, but they were all older games that were past their prime. A good start.
But releasing a brand new game as free and ad-supported? Brilliant! Should also completely curb piracy, as it'll be available free and it will be impossible/difficult to remove the ads without the source code so people will just download the retail version.
It's about time someone stepped to the plate. Let's see how it does. There's really only one question- will it suck? If the game sucks, and thus no one downloads it, you just know that there will be analysts concluding that nobody wants free games w/advertising (they never take the content into account when running numbers).
If the game is good, this could spark an industry change. Will it be for the better? Dunno. Some games I would rather pay full price and have no ads- can you imagine Shadow of the Colossus with Coca-Cola ads?
Still, it's EA doing something innovative. I'm pretty sure that's one of the signs of the apocalypse.
