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Ferrari have announced an alliance with SCEE which means that finally you can drive a Ferrari in Gran Turismo! More importantly it underlines how seriously the automotive manufacturers are about leveraging an ever growing audience. With 45 million copies of the game sold its a bit of a no brainer that a marque like Ferrari is now involved.

Licensing has traditionally been a complex area Advergaming and Sponsorships is a great article which talks about all aspects of in-game advertisement and sponsorships in particular the section titled A Gray Line: Licensing vs. Advertising.

Nissan North America and microsoft recently announced expansion plans to a long term partnership which originally involved integrating the xbox 360 platform into a concept car called the URGE.

The partnership now extends to microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions platforms such as; Windows live, MSN, live Search, Xbox and Windows mobile. Nissan are the primary sponsor of Forza 2 Motorsport for xbox 360 and are co-sponsoring Open for Design program.

Ford announced earlier this year their plans for an advergame called Ford Bold Moves Street racing". Fords advergame strategy carries a greater amount of risk than the product placement approach taken by Nissan and Ferrari and will be interesting to see how it all pans out. My money is on Nissan and Ferrari doing very well and Fords strategy falling flat. And its not only my personal opinion. Gamespot reviews arent very favourable with ratings of bad to poor for the various platforms (Xbox 360, PC etc) which bodes very poorly for Ford. To quote a review: When people complain about racing games because they are boring, Ford Bold Moves is exactly the kind of game they are talking about.

Risky indeed.