Just when it seemed like the modern video gaming landscape couldn’t get any more bleak than it already is, along comes Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson with the revelation that the company is actively looking to start placing real-world advertisements “inside our game experiences”.
This intrusive plan for the Star Wars: Jedi series publisher’s future was first divulged by Wilson during the Q&A portion of the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call, as held on May 7th.
Fielding one final question before as the call drew to a close, Wilson was pressed by Goldman Sachs Analyst Eric Sheridan for his thoughts on “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games across different formats and how you think that might be revenue opportunity over the medium to long term”.
In turn, Wilson asserted, “I think it’s still early on that front, and we have looked over the course of our history to be very, 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 beyond 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,” he then concluded, “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.”
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Notably, EA’s interest in allowing their titles to be used as real-world advertising platforms is far from a new development.
From small banners for Adidas being placed along the fields in 1993’s FIFA International Soccer, to the plastering of billboards for then-candidate Barack Obama’s presidential campaign across the roads of 2008’s Burnout Paradise, to hitting players of 2020’S UFC 4 with a full-blown ad for Amazon’s The Boys during replays, the notoriously greedy corporate publisher has long been attempting to use ad sales as another avenue with which to monetize their games.
And though such attempts are regularly and universally rejected by players, the overall negative sentiment towards in-game advertisements has not stopped EA from trying to implement them – rather, it’s led them to try and be more ‘subtle’ in their methods of doing so.
Most recently, in-game advertisements were included in 2023’s UFC 5 – however, rather than intrusively throwing them at players throughout the course of the game, EA instead made their viewing completely optional, with players who choose to do so being offered in-game currency in exchange for their time.
