EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games — titles that players purchase up-front for around $70 apiece. In the Q&A part of EA’s latest earnings call, Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs asked Wilson about dynamic ad insertion in traditional AAA games. Wilson said, “…Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us.” He then continued, “…we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.”
Well that’s true to some extent, but there has been past attempts at this, and they have been pushed back successfully, even with those ‘masses’ being there in previous generations.
Also recent victories show that even in today’s environment, positive change can be effected.
Try not to be cynical. If we lose, we lose, but at least we can look at ourselves in the mirror the next day.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
If they are fullscreen ads that disrupt, then yeah pushback is expected. But they wont do this, they will slip them in slowly and people wont generally care.
Pushback from gamers only usually happens when its something like losing the ability to play the game - see recent helldivers controversy.
There should have been a pushback on microtransactions from the start, but people just said “well you dont have to buy them” and here we are.
That’s not true though. They’ve tried adding ads in games for decades now, and they’ve always been pushed back successfully.
Just, hold. Stay the course. This new generation can do the same thing that previous gens have already proven can be done.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
There’s already types of ads in video games. Fortnite is full of them in the way of ‘crossovers’ and virtual music festivals. Death Stranding had Monster Energy in. There’s probably more too, they do it subtly and EA would start with their sports games, selling ads to show on the pitch for example like what they do IRL.