There was a time — not at all long ago — where those darned immersion-breaking, in-game ads were popular. Ben Cousins, the general manager of EA’s free-to-play division, believes those days are over, or at the very least, we’re getting to that point.
“We actually aren’t getting much from ad revenue at all. The in-game advertising business hasn’t grown as fast as people expected it to,” he toldEdge. “If you think about how fast the virtual goods business has grown in the last year or so, it’s been much quicker and become a much more reliable source of revenue.”
ForBattlefield Heroes, EA used both “in-game advertising and virtual goods sales, and one of those took off really fast and the other hasn’t really taken off at all. I’m not convinced that we’ll have billboards in games and things like that. Maybe those days are over,” Cousins explained.
