EA working on integrating ads into more games, possibly even AAA titles

Electronic Arts is currently working on new ways to integrate ads into its games, and it's possible the ads could extend outside of sports.

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EA is no stranger to advertising. The company's EA Sports label makes multi-million deals with top brands like Nike, Pepsi, and even teamed up with Uber Eats to make an FC24 tournament. Advertising is a big part of sports sims.

But what about EA's other titles? Games like Battlefield, or even Dragon Age and Mass Effect? Could advertisements show up there in some way? In a recent Q4 earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson says that there are teams currently looking at ways to place more ads into games, but the extent of this remains unclear.

EA's official advertising site shows that the company is pretty selective on where and how its ads are placed. The site says ads work in 3 different ways in EA games:

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Notice how there's no mention of "video and display media" within premium console games. However, EA has done strange things with ads in the past. Kotaku notes that EA put billboard ads for President Barack Obama's campaign in Burnout Paradise, and even put splash screen ads in UFC 4 for Amazon's TV show The Boys.

Below is a transcript of what the EA CEO said during the call:

Eric James Sheridan - Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division - MD & US Internet Analyst

"[...]the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games across different formats and how you think that might be revenue opportunity over the medium to long term?[...]"

Andrew Wilson - Electronic Arts Inc. - Chairman & CEO

"To answer your question on advertising broadly, again, I think it's still early on that front. 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.

"We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.

"But more importantly, as we start to build community and harness the power of community beyond the bounds of our games, how do we think about advertising as a growth driver in those types of experiences?"