Posted on Friday, December 24 2010 @ 22:34 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Game publisher EA admits in-game advertising hasn't lived up to expectations. The company's general manager of free-to-play, Ben Cousins,
told EDGE that in-game advertising isn't bringing in much revenue at all. He identifies microtransactions as the field where good money is to be made:
He points to the success enjoyed by Zynga, the publisher that has enjoyed huge revenues from microtransactions in its Facebook games, as evidence of his claim. “If you think about how fast the virtual goods business has grown in the last year or so, it’s been much quicker and become a much more reliable source of revenue.”
Cousins spoke to us ahead of the release of Battlefield: Play4Free, EA’s PC shooter which is set to launch next spring. It follows the success of the free-to-play Battlefield Heroes, released last year, which contained both in-game advertising and microtransactions. “We hedged our bets,” he said. “we thought we’d do in-game advertising and virtual goods sales, and one of those took off really fast and the other hasn’t really taken off at all.”
