Another day, another move by EA to wind up pretty much the whole of the gaming community. In the publisher’s latest financial report, CEO Andrew Wilson has said it’s looking at “thoughtful” implementation of adverts in its upcoming games. That, presumably, would include its next generation of racing games.
Truthfully, racing games with adverts are no new thing. Any game with licensed cars may as well be advertising in itself, while circuits in sim-focused racers are often filled with hoardings which both serve as a point of immersion and a convenient way to squeeze marketing in naturally.
WRC is one of the many racing titles under EA’s banner
Arcade racers are no stranger either – EA’s own Burnout Paradise famously featured frequently-updated billboards that at one stage even included campaign material for Barack Obama’s bid for the US presidency in 2008.
However, EA could take things a step further still. As reported by Eurogamer, Wilson fielded questions from investors, commenting: “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 we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.”
In truth, racing games are already pretty heavy with ads
How exactly advertising could be implemented by EA remains to be seen, be that more prominent product placement, shamelessly-implemented 30 second clips before games or some other unknown method. However, it could have a huge impact on racing games – with F1, WRC and GRID titles under the EA banner, along with Need For Speed.
EA wouldn’t be the first to shoehorn shameless ads into games, though. Netflix has its own small Netflix Games arm as a free service which relies on ad support.
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