EA is looking to put real advertisements inside video games, again

During the recent earnings call, the CEO of Electronic Arts, Andrew Wilson, to a question regarding the implementation of advertisements inside videos, responded positively saying that the company has already been working on it.

“We’ll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside our game experiences,” Wilson responded to the question. What does this mean? Now, players can gamble and watch ads in a game they purchased for full price.

What’s interesting is that this is also not the first time the company have tried to do it. A few months after the release of EA Sports UFC 4 back in 2020, EA sneaked advertisements for Amazon Prime during replays, leading to a massive backlash. Perhaps, this time, the company expects players to accept them just because they are telling it beforehand.

Can in-game ads translate to a win-win situation?

The video game industry is a lucrative one, and it doesn’t come as a surprise that most companies want to bag as much profit as they can. Be it through loot boxes, in-game cosmetics or advertisements inside games in future.

However, ad placement in a video game is nothing new and not necessarily a bad thing, several games have put products inside their games as part of the environment and other things. Most of the time, people will know it’s an ad placement, however, unless it breaks the immersion, most players won’t have any problem. Furthermore, it might also make game prices stable in a very ambitious world.

For example, if the company places energy drink assets in machines or ads on billboards in open-world games, most people will not care. But if the same adverts started popping on their screen during gameplay like mobile games, then it would be a problem.

While EA did try to sugarcoat their words, the company already have a history of bad practices with their gaming titles. The Star Wars Battlefront 2 loot box controversy was likely the biggest backlash to the company. With how they handled the UFC 4 advertisement initiative, players now have even less trust in their words.