Electronic Arts, the video game company that you’d more than likely think of first when asked, “Which video game company would sincerely explore the idea of running adverts inside its games?”, has revealed it’s sincerely exploring the idea of running adverts inside its games.
Speaking during an investor call, EA’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, fielded questions around how the company might look at implementing dynamic ad insertion (essentially pulling up-to-date ads into games over time) in the future. Which – and fair cop to this having been brought up by a punter and not EA itself – the company responded to by saying that’s something it’s actively got teams looking into.
Wilson said in his response that the company is being “very thoughtful” as it looks into how it might introduce advertising into its games in the future, but admits that EA is looking very intently at how it can make the most of the billions of hours consumers spend playing, looking at or otherwise engaging with its games, saying, “…our expectation is that advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us.”
“We’ll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences,” Wilson adds. “But more importantly, as we start to build community and harness the power of community beyond the bounds of our games, how do we think about advertising as a growth driver in those types of experiences?”
Of course, it’s far from the first time that EA (or any publisher) has flirted with running real-world ads in its games, sometimes in at least partially-entertaining ways, like Mercenaries 2’s billboards which players were encouraged to blow up (I’ll let Destructoid elaborate on that one) and other times in the most intrusive ways possible, like updating already-released games to add actual commercial breaks to gameplay (this was at least reversed after the fact):
EA decided to add full-on commercials in the middle of gameplay in a $60 game a month after it’s release so it wasn’t talked about in reviews
byu/Ydino inassholedesign