In March of this year, Electronic Arts moved its in-game advertising business in-house in order to be on the forefront of a coming wave. Unfortunately, according to EA’s general manager of free-to-play titles, Ben Cousins, the in-game ads business hasn’t been too lucrative for EA yet. In fact, Cousins points out that micro-transactions have pushed the company’s bottom line much further, pointing to similar success at other companies like Zynga.
“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,” said Cousins to Edge. “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.”
“We hedged our bets. We thought we’d do 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,” he added.
Following the impressive success of the free-to-play Battlefield Heroes, EA is jumping in with both feet on Battlefield Play4Free, a full featured Battlefield game using the freemium business model. The game is expected to go live on Spring 2011, and may signal a shift in priorities at EA. Battlefield Heroes taught the publisher a great deal about reaching customers with in-game items and advertising.
“I think it’s more about specific deals where you can tie the content in,” he said. “We did a deal with Dr Pepper for Battlefield Heroes, where if you buy a bottle and scan in the code you get an exclusive outfit. That kind of deep integration will work, I think, but I’m not convinced that we’ll have billboards in games and things like that. Maybe those days are over.”
