EA has confirmed it is thinking about putting adverts in AAA games and has spoken about wanting to use AI more in the development process.
During a recent earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson was asked about the chance of more “dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games”, with Wilson explaining that the studio currently has internal teams “looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences (via PC Gamer).”
“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,” he added.
Earlier this month, tech company Roku filed a patent that would allow for adverts to be shown to gamers when they pause their game while last year, Ubisoft experimented with in-game advertising that was deemed “intrusive”.
Elsewhere in the financial call, Wilson claimed that 50 per cent of the development process for games could be “positively impacted by the advances in generative AI. And we’ve got teams across the company really looking to execute against that,” he added (via VGC).
Wilson went on to say EA had 40 years of user data to help train AI and there was a “real hunger” from developers to implement that as soon as possible. “The holy grail for us is to build bigger, more innovative, more creative, more fun games more quickly so that we can entertain more people around the world on a global basis at a faster rate,” he explained.
He went on to say that the time frame for creating a stadium in EA Sports FC has shrunk from six months to six weeks, thanks to generative AI. “We’re really looking at how can it make us more efficient, how can it give our developers more power, how can it give them back more time and allow them to get to the fun more quickly,” Wilson added.
“As a company, we’ve been deeply tied to AI since our inception. It has been the very centre of all of the games that we create, replicating human intelligence in the context of a game play experience,” he continued. “But certainly, as we think about the wave of generative AI today and as it merges into artificial general intelligence, broadly, we’re still very early.
In other news, the upcoming PC port of Ghost Of Tsushima has been removed from digital retailers in nearly 200 countries due to restrictions of the PlayStation Network.