EA Pushes for Standardized In-Game Ads in Free-to-Play Titles Across Industry
Electronic Arts is pushing harder for in-game advertising to become a normal, industry-wide feature—moving from retrofitting ads into existing games to building them into new releases, with a focus on free-to-play titles.
EA wants ads treated as part of development
Alexander Dao, EA’s VP of advertising and sponsorship, said many long-running games don’t include advertising infrastructure from the start, describing it instead as “retrofit” work. EA, he explained, launched an advertising platform to bring brands in more flexibly and dynamically as the company creates both new experiences and additional content for existing titles.
Dao indicated that future EA games will be designed around making in-game ads part of the development process, especially in free-to-play releases.
Dynamic placement and “enhance, not disrupt” messaging
EA’s push builds on an earlier announcement from last month: the company unveiled an in-game advertising department intended to handle “dynamic, real-time placement” on elements such as in-game banners and billboards. That initiative was framed with a commitment to “enhance, not disrupt, the player experience.”
Standardization push with ad industry partners
Dao also said EA has been working with external partners to standardize parts of the system. He named the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Integral Ad Science as collaborators.
In EA’s plan, those efforts are meant to produce standards for creating brand-name 3D assets and for tracking metrics that brands can use. The stated aim is to make reporting and measurement consistent so other publishers and platforms can adopt similar approaches without fragmenting the experience for marketers.
Consistency is the goal
Dao said EA wants to ensure that when other publishers and platforms implement comparable in-game advertising, the results they share back to brands remain consistent. He argued that the work EA is doing—through platform capability and industry standardization—should support broader adoption of in-game ads beyond EA-developed games.
