Electronic Arts has revealed that in-game ads don’t bring in the revenue that they thought they’d receive, and that microtransactions are far more profitable.
In an interview with Ben Cousins, general manager of free-to-play operations for Electronic Arts, he stated that in-game ad sales are underperforming and not “getting much from ad revenue at all.”” In fact, in-game ad use and profitability “hasn’t grown as fast as people expected it to.”
That’s not to say in-game ads won’t be prevalent in the future. Everything has ads on it now: television, movie theaters, billboards, web browsers, T-shirts, sneakers, and so forth. They just haven’t figured out how to employ it.
