Electronic Arts (EA) has signed a deal with a new kind of advertisement platform that excels in bringing television spots to console games.
According to a report by Axios earlier today, PlayerWON has just successfully tested its advertisement platform and the results were good enough for EA to ink a deal which looks to be for a trial campaign.
The idea behind PlayerWON is to give advertisers an easier way to reach younger audiences through console games. While in-game advertisments are not new, having traditional television spots or television-styled advertisments in games open up new avenues for publishers as well as advertisers.
PlayerWON uses its own online infrastructure to stream advertisments straight into console games and the platform is designed to give players the option to avail in-game rewards such as in-game currency or cosmetic items for watching the advertisments.
The aggressive business model is already being used for mobile games and as such, publishers can expect a backlash from players when they are forced to pause their gameplay between each advert.
EA is however not the only publisher interested in what PlayerWON offers. Hi-Rez Studios, the publisher of Smite, is another which has signed up with the one-of-a-kind advertisement platform. Smite has in fact already run a trial campaign which showed that players are more likely to spend on microtransactions if they are shown television-like spots.
EA notably has a vast mobile games library and its interest in the platform should not come as a surprise. The concern though being that according to ongoing PlayerWON trials, players are “willing to watch up to ten ads per day in order to unlock free perks.”
Recall that EA came under fire last year for placing real-life unskippable advertisement spots in UFC 4 after release. The publisher apologized soon afterwards and removed the adverts once players made their voices heard.
2K Sports, as another publisher, has already pulled off the same stunt multiple times. Both NBA 2K20 and NBA 2K21 had unskippable adverts.
