Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they’ve purchased a game — now, it appears, the company’s hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company’s Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games,” he said the company’s already working on it.
“We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences,” said Wilson.
↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge
Ads in games are definitely not new – we’ve seen countless games built entirely around brands, like Tapper for Budweiser, Pepsiman, or Cool Spot for 7-Up – and banner ads and product placement in various games has been a thing for decades, too. It seems like EA wants to take this several steps further and use things like dynamic ad insertion in games, so that when you’re playing some racing game, you’ll get an ad for your local Hyundai dealer, or an ad for a gun store when you’re playing GTA in the US.
Either way, it’s going to make games worse, which is perfectly in line with EA’s mission.
Don’t worry, someone’s probably patented dynamic in-game ads already, so they’ll be on the receiving end of a lawsuit before too long.
dboddie,
You mean like this one?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9666029B1/en?oq=9666029
The patent system is such a mess, Unsurprisingly companies like EU have got a list of patents that goes on and on. Most of these patents are absolute garbage, but with enough legalese and the right courtroom, even garbage patents can be used to enforce royalties. Regardless of who owns a patent, it’s horrendously expensive and inefficient for everybody involved and It’s it’s always consumers who end up paying the price. We’d be better off without software patents… Ugh!
There are games and then there are playable monetizations.
I recommend staying away from the latter.
Problem is, the former get rarer by the year.
It’ll be more interesting to see if Sony/Microsoft allow this considering such dynamic ads are the most common source of malware attacks, plus their certification requirements that games don’t crash when testing. Then you could theoretically use a man in the middle attack to pose as the ad server and inject code to crack the system’s security. I don’t foresee this outside of PC gaming.
dark2,
One would expect the ad channels to be encrypted just like an HTTPS session. Who knows though it could happen. All of the malicious ads I’ve seen in the wild have been based on social engineering. Hell I’ve been caught off guard on android a couple times because I didn’t know there were ads in the application and the ads were impersonating normal application functionality. It’s a perfect trap for the unsuspecting. This could happen on console too.
Well, good on you for being optimistic I guess… but of course there’s bound to be an increase on console too The only way they won’t is if microsoft/sony/nintendo ban them, but these very same companies would benefit from ads especially if they demand a cut 🙁 Ads are a corporate drug, and they’re all drug users.
Sad that the company of Wing Commander, System Shock, Crusader, Theme Hospital, Command and Conquer, Red Alert and so many other great title, great value games has fallen to this level. I wish EA would get broken up so others could use the IP in a more productive way.
EA was doing that with Burnout Paradise in 2009.