Webzen hooks up with Massive

The lure of incremental bucks from advertisers interested in reaching gamers has jumped the ocean to Asia. One of Korea's biggest game operators, Webzen, said it would add the Massive SDK to two of its upcoming games, the David Jones-designed APB (Jones was part of the original Grand Theft Auto team at DMA Design) and Huxley, an upcoming massively multiplayer first-person shooter built using the Unreal 3 engine.

Both games will get worldwide releases, according to Webzen, and will tailor ads for each market the games are released in. Huxley is due to retail in 2007, while APB is due the following year.

Massive, one of the first companies to develop technology that enables ads to stream into in-game environments, was acquired in early May by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum (estimated by The Wall Street Journal to be in the $200 to $400 million range). Microsoft intends to integrate the Massive technology into its Xbox Live and MSN Games suite of games.

Massive says more than 60 advertisers are in its network, including Coca-Cola, NBC, Honda, and Panasonic. The company has working relationships with a range of publishers, including NCsoft, Atari, Konami, Codemasters, Vivendi Games, 2K Sports, Spark Unlimited, Acclaim, Sony Online Entertainment, Ubisoft, THQ, and Eidos.