Recent comments from a Monday Electronic Arts (EA) earnings call, have agitated the ire of the gaming community. Nearing the end of the call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed in an answer that integration of ads within video games were being one of the many future features being worked on at the company, despite being in its very early stages.

“To answer your question on advertising broadly, again, I think it’s still early on that front,” said Wilson. “And we have looked over the course of our history to be very thoughtful about advertising in the context of our play experiences. But again, 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.”

Wilson continued, stating that EA was particularly interested in integrating ads into their AAA titles. Currently, early development has been focused on figuring out a way to “thoughtfully” implement ads within games to maintain a high quality player experience.

EA CEO says they’re looking at putting ads in their video games 🎮 pic.twitter.com/sInIZv8kLv

— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) May 10, 2024

This hasn’t been the first time Ad integration has been a discussion within EA or the video game industry as a whole. EA has experimented with integrating ad into it’s AAA titles in the last few years.

So it’s to no one’s surprise that the recent earned call has generated backlash from the gaming community.

I’m interested in just not buying their games. https://t.co/yyA0S8CLjE

— Mutahar (@OrdinaryGamers) May 10, 2024

For the gaming community ad integration, especially from well of companies like EA, seems like just another way rake in money especially when considering modern AAA games cost $70, not to mention micro-transactions.