Nolan Bushnell is the founder of a little company known as Atari. Nolan has moved on to other ventures since Atari and one of those ventures is the chairman of a new company called NeoEdge. NeoEdge is an in-game-advertisement startup aiming to push game advertisements in exchange for free games.

NeoEdge’s model is a bit different from the other in-game-advertisement models because they plan to take a TV approach to advertisement and put the ads in the beginning of the games. The ads will also appear at natural breaks in the games. The ads are in a video format as well, making the ads a little harder to ignore. It is easy to ignore text ads and look at what is being advertised, but it is a little harder to ignore video ads.

Nolan sees this advertising model as another way to monetize the casual games industry and break away from the try before you buy model.

“Remember, there’s a lot of people who will not put a credit card online,” something that would be necessary to buy a casual game, Bushnell said. “So (this) puts them in the monetization stream with their eyeballs.”

Nolan’s first company ended up doing really well, in its day.  It will be interesting to see if this advertising model will be the one to work and change the monetization model of casual games.

Thanks News.com