EA is notorious for attempting to extract as much money as possible from its customers, even after they have purchased full-price AAA games, and it has no plans to change this practice.
The company is currently working on adding advertisements to its high-budget games. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed ongoing efforts in this area.
Mainstream AAA games
Responding to an analyst’s question about the possibility of more dynamic advertising in mainstream AAA games, Wilson confirmed that such initiatives are already underway.
The CEO said:
We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.
The silver lining is that it may still be some time before EA introduces in-game ads, as Wilson notes, “It’s still early on that front.”
Ubisoft’s Ads
It is possible that these ads will be less intrusive than Ubisoft’s ads, as Wilson claims that the better ad opportunity is to place them outside of the game’s boundaries, i.e. outside the game itself.
Even if the ad is outside of the gameplay area, such as billboards in racing games, it would be preferable to Ubisoft’s display of a full-screen ad while a player was attempting to view the map in Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
The ad received a lot of negative feedback online, to the point where Ubisoft had to call it a “technical error.”
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