EA wants to bring ‘dynamic ads’ to more games

EA has long made it known that it is constantly exploring ways to further monetise its games. The company is already planning to usher in AI tools to cut out a number of human workers and build products faster. Alongside this, EA is also further looking into bringing in-game advertising to more titles. 

This isn't EA's first rodeo in this arena. In-game advertising was popularised by the mobile game market. In one of EA's first experiments with this in a major release, it placed a near full-screen advert for Amazon Prime series, The Boys, in the replay menu for fights in UFC 4. Naturally, this sparked a wave of backlash and the ad was disabled.

Now, EA's Andrew Wilson has begun telling investors about the company's plans to get into the ‘Dynamic Ad Insertion' business, in which adverts will be placed in games based on metrics like ‘habits, history and interests', which sounds … just awful. Sports games will no doubt start displaying ads whenever there is a game break for things like halftime, substitutions or pit stops.

Other potential ways this could be used is via AFK timers. Many often hit pause on their controller and walk away to grab something, or do something relatively quick. Those people may soon walk back to find some kind of unwanted commercial.

Unfortunately, with the amount companies like EA already get away with in the sports game market, in-game ads will almost certainly become a key component in many future games and it will no doubt make the folks at the top of EA all a bit richer.

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KitGuru Says: This sounds like a terrible idea but if there is money to be made, EA is going to be there chasing that bag. We can only hope that advertisements are mainly reserved to sports games, leaving things like single-player RPGs out of the equation. 

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