Publishers are not religious either. Even if publishers take ads from IGA/Double Fusion, if they don't get their cut, then they will pressure IGA/DF to get ads from somewhere.

Google will get into that space because they have the advertisers tied up, regardless of who has the publishers tied up.

When Google acquired Adscape Media, they also acquired the patents of the technology tools that make it straight-forward to deliver episodic games. If they would actually use the technology to enable episodic games, they would add tremendous value to game publishers and gamers. I'd rather pay $10 for the first episode of a game and continue paying if I like it rather than paying $60 for a game that I eventually find I don't like. The same risk model that applies to the game publishers also applies to consumers. If you buy a game you don't like, you're only out $10 instead of $60. If you like the game, you're happy to pay $10/episode for a long time.

Distribution of such games is easy with high-speed internet, big hard disks/blue-ray, and the technology from Adscape.

How are Google going to get into that space when companies like IGA and to a lesser extent Double Fusion have all the inventory tied up for 3 to 5 years?

This guy know anything of games design? I am a games designer specializing in RPG's and I hardly play any games (I research them but hardly ever play them) because they are all, more or less, the exact same game done in a different game engine.

There is hardly ever any innovation or reformatting of old style gameplay systems. Take World of Warcraft; as good as it is it is not a new game, it is a perfect example of the D20 system, originally conceived in the 1980's. For an 'RPG' it lacks any kind of truly customizable content (except stat changes on weapons) and for its engine and RTS origins Bliz could have produced a much more user-creative game.

I admit that the Wii contains some innovative games but the move to the casual sector has left hard core gamers like myself who have expected innovation and development of our favorite genres to develop, not stagnate into crystalline examples of gameplay we experienced years ago.

In most games, ads just dont have a place in the environment, in sports games they already exist.

If games are supposed to be fun, and not distracting, like popups or out-of-place-content, or making you pause, like commercials, how can this possibly work?

If I sold or was selling a company to do it, I would say it will work too, but its not simple to place ads like it is on web pages, where the space can simply be used for content or ads.