By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CN

EA is prototyping in-game ads even as we speak

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2024-05-11 00:30:04

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they’ve purchased a game — now, it appears, the company’s hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company’s Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games,” he said the company’s already working on it.

“We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences,” said Wilson.

I don’t want to take Wilson out of context. If you read the full question and answer (page 12), you’ll see that in-game ads aren’t the thing he’s most excited about. He says it’s “still early on that front,” repeatedly says EA needs to be “very thoughtful,” and suggests the bigger ad opportunity is “beyond the bounds” of games — outside of a game itself.