After Funcom's decision to distribute Anarchy Online, their space MMORPG, free of charge, they now bring us an entirely new change that might be of great influence to the genre. The world of Anarchy Online is packed with billboards and advertising panels and from now on these panels will contain real advertisements.

This is an entirely new form of productplacement in both video and audio format. Free accounts will not be able to deactivate these ads while paying customers will have the option to disable the commercials.

Funcom has already announced that these advertisements willl not be used to gain personal information about the player, nor will they result in higher latency.

The first few messages have already been sent into the world with Panasonic and Channel 4 at the head of this revolutionairy way of advertising.

In other news: