Facepalm: It seems EA is suffering from the kind of insanity described by Far Cry 3’s Vaas Montenegro. The gaming giant is considering placing ads in its full-price AAA games, again, and presumably expects the outcome to be different this time.
Speaking during the company’s latest earnings briefing, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in-game advertising could become a “meaningful driver of growth” for the firm.
Wilson added that internal teams at EA were looking at how they could do “very thoughtful implementations” of ads inside EA titles, though that reassurance is unlikely to placate gamers.
What’s surprising is that EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during ‘Replay’ moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in reviews. It wasn’t long before the backlash led to EA disabling the ads.
EA decided to add full-on commercials in the middle of gameplay in a $60 game a month after it’s release so it wasn’t talked about in reviews
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In-game ads are almost as old as video games themselves, stretching back to 1978’s Adventureland, which included an ad for the game’s sequel, Pirate Adventure. Then there was 1983’s Tapper, a game about serving Budweiser beer to bar patrons, while the 1990s brought a slew of games with ads – this writer recalls wanting some Chupa Chups after playing Zool on the Amiga.
The 2000s saw a different method of in-game advertising gain popularity: billboards. By placing ads on background boards in racing and sports games, much like one would see in real life, they feel less intrusive. Barack Obama’s campaign paid EA to include political ads in Burnout Paradise in 2008. The company also signed deals with ad firms to bring in-game ads to Madden, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, NHL, and NASCAR games. However, there were also immersion-breaking ads for Pepsi and Intel that appeared in Battlefield 2142.
In 2023, SCS Software announced that it sold ad space inside American Truck Simulator to Schneider National. The company placed job adverts looking for drivers on billboards alongside the virtual roads.
Back in 2022, EA patented a system that generates in-game content and ads based on a person’s playstyle. It could, for example, recommend bullet hell or Soulslike titles for someone who keeps diving headlong into tough battles, or suggest buying a specific item or piece of DLC based on a persona.
After announcing it will lay off around 670 people earlier this year, EA somehow made itself even more disliked in consumers’ eyes when it talked about how generative AI will make people spend more money on games.