Electronic Arts Considers To Bring Back In-Game Ads

(RTTNews) - Electronic Arts (EA) is toying with the idea of putting ads in traditional AAA games, which are purchased up-front by players for $70 apiece.

The news comes as during the Q&A session of the company's recent earnings call, an analyst asked about "the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games", to which CEO Andrew Wilson admitted, "We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences."

However, the company's earlier attempt to display in-game commercials received a backlash when they placed full-screen in-game ads for the TV show The Boys in UFC 4 in 2020. The gamers criticized that the commercials were disrupting their game, prompting the company to disable the ads.

Wilson added, "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".

Previously, games such as Adventureland, Tapper, Burnout Paradise and many more featured commercials in between the games to earn extra revenue.