According to Electronic Arts ‘s CEO, the company is thinking about putting more ads in its big-budget games. EA, known for its extensive game library, has become one of the biggest third-party developers in the gaming industry, with titles like Battlefield, Need for Speed, and various sports games. The studio has also published some of the most popular franchises, such as The Sims and Apex Legends. During its latest earnings call, Electronic Arts’s CEO Andrew Wilson said that the company is planning to increase the presence of ads in its games. But Brave CEO Brendan Eich, is not impressed.
During the Q&A session of the Electronic Arts Q4 Earnings Call Electronic Arts representatives were asked about: “…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 Chairman & CEO of Electronic Arts Inc. answered: “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?”
RELATED: Take-Two Interactive ’s $2 Billion GTA 6 By Rockstar Games Could Be Make Or Break
Electronic Arts have previously come under fire for placing ads in games that they have already paid for. But now gamers are not only concerned about more ads in games that they have already paid for, but also what exactly the concept of “dynamic ads” would entail, and particularly how intrusive it would be on privacy.
Gamers are not alone in their concerns about the nature of the dynamic ads. Brendan Eich, Brave, Mozilla & Firefox Co-founder, Brave CEO creator of JavaScript also raised the issue, threatening that Brave stands by with blocking. He posted on X: “Sponsored in-game billboards may fly but “dynamic” ads sound like trouble re: privacy + obtrusiveness. Point of order: AAA games cost $70 or more, premium products, upsells and charges already blowing back. If ads go too far, WebAssembly/WebGPU/Brave stand ready, incl. blocking.”
Let us know in the comments what you think about Brendan Eich and Brave standing by to block Electronic Arts’ dynamic ads.
A good back to the lore would be how Brandon Eich got forced out of Mozilla back in the day