Image: Electronic Arts
You might have ads in your $70 games, but at least they’ll be ‘thoughtful’.
Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has announced that the game's publisher is looking to, “harness the power,” of its players with, “thoughtful implementations,” of in-game advertisements. Wilson spoke about EA’s plans for in-game advertising during a Q&A session in the company’s Q4 financial report.
“We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences,” Wilson confirmed during the call.
Electronic Arts is looking into in-game ads
During EA’s Q4 earnings call, CEO Andrew Wilson answered questions from investors relating to in-game advertising. Wilson said that the company has to be, “very thoughtful about advertising,” but that it, “has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth.” However, Wilson also noted that he thinks, “it's still early on that front.”
Wilson said:
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.
The CEO went on to confirm that there are, “teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.” That directly confirms that EA is already working on displaying advertisements inside of its videogames, though it’s unclear if these ads will be for other EA games or unrelated products from outside the company.
Interestingly, this earnings call also confirmed that the company is in the midst of forming its, “largest Battlefield team in franchise history,” to work on, “connected multiplayer and single-player experiences,” in the next entry of the first-person shooter series. On the new Battlefield sequel, Wilson said:
Our teams have listened to the community, have learned valuable lessons, and are driving to the future. Motive, armed with cutting-edge Frostbite technology and compelling storytelling, is joining DICE, Criterion, and Ripple Effect to build a Battlefield universe across connected multiplayer and single-player experiences. This is the largest Battlefield team in franchise history.
After Battlefield 2042, one hopes that the franchise can only go uphill from here.