Video game developers are constantly looking for additional ways to generate revenue from their releases, and it seems Electronic Arts (EA) CEO Andrew Wilson is considering advertisements within games as a way to get them in front of consumers. Specifically, the CEO and the team he oversees are looking into how ads could fit into their AAA games, as he stated during the question and answer portion of EA’s latest earnings call. When asked about dynamic ad insertion by Goldman Sachs’ Eric Sheridan, Wilson responded with:
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“To answer your question on advertising broadly, again, I think it’s still early on that front. And we have looked over the course of our history to be very thoughtful about advertising in the context of our play experiences. But again, as we think about the many, many billions of hours spent, both playing, creating, watching and connecting and where much of that engagement happens to be on the bounds of a traditional game experience, 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. 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?”
So while ad-implementation on a larger scale still seems to be in the early stages of conceptualization for EA, it’s certainly something the company is exploring as they look to capitalize on the many players their games draw in for hours of their lives. Product placement and advertisements in video games overall is certainly not a new concept, as there have been plenty of instances historically including a Mercedes Benz in Mario Kart 8, Duracell batteries and Verizon billboards in Alan Wake, Monster Energy drinks in Death Stranding, and even EA put an ad for Prime Video’s The Boys in UFC 4 in 2020 (though it was removed due to backlash).
The fact that EA learned its lesson the hard way with The Boys and UFC 4 and Wilson’s comment above about EA intending to include “very thoughtful implementations” of ads in their products will hopefully indicate that if this a route explored in the future, it won’t be in a way that inspires an eyeroll from its players.
And hey, maybe this is an opportunity to include Cerveza Cristal in a future Star Wars game.
