EA is prototyping in-game ads even as we speak
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge
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.
I don’t want to take Wilson out of context. If you read the full question and answer (page 12), you’ll see that in-game ads aren’t the thing he’s most…