As one of the most classic "cash cows" on the Internet, the game has always been undoubtedly in the public eye. For example, the reason why the rumors such as Tencent's "Honor of Kings" team with a year-end bonus of 100 months' salary and the year-end bonus of "Genshin Impact" developer miHoYo is as high as 108 salaries undoubtedly comes from the stereotype that making games is very profitable.
However, the good days of the game industry can be regarded as gone forever, and the leaders of major factories have either come out to complain recently, or have written the idea of making money by unscrupulous means on their faces.
A few days ago, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa stood up and said that he believes that the company's game development time will increase over time, and the production will be more difficult, and game development will "inevitably" become "more lengthy, complex and sophisticated" in the future.
Immediately after, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said on the earnings call, "When we consider the billions of hours spent playing, creating, watching, and connecting, and the majority of that engagement happens to be within the confines of traditional gaming experiences, our expectation is that advertising has the opportunity to be a growth driver." ”
It is reported that there is already a special team within EA that is working on how to add advertising content to the game while ensuring the experience. In other words, EA wants to use the established player community to break the boundaries of the game, that is, to find more profitable business in the game.
For today's EA, it is undoubtedly a top priority to be more aggressive in seeking revenue scale growth to achieve a healthier financial position. After two mass layoffs in 2023, EA in 2024 is still in trouble, which forced it to undertake a cost-cutting program earlier this year.
In related plans, EA will cut another 5% of its workforce (about 670 people), and the development work of a large number of its studios will also be forced to adjust. For example, the Star Wars-themed shooter being developed by Respawn was canceled, Ridgeline Games, which developed the single-player story mode of Battlefield, was disbanded, and EA announced that it would abandon the development of licensed IP that would not succeed in the future. Combined with the fact that the executive will add ads to the game, EA almost has the idea of making money written on its face.
Of course, in the traditional overseas game market with paid buyouts, EA is one of the few manufacturers that recognizes the commercial value of game as a service (GaaS) and takes it as the company's main business development direction, so much so that it is nicknamed "North American Tencent" by domestic players. So can adding ads to games to get higher revenues open up new business models for big games? In the eyes of quite a few practitioners, EA may be a sudden illness and rush to the doctor, and it is even better to forget the pain of the scar.
Advertising is the most commonly used monetization method in the modern business system, in fact, as early as the embryonic days of the game industry, some people with insight discovered that video games can be used to display advertisements. For example, in 1983, Marvin Glass and Associates developed "Tapper", the Budweiser logo was used throughout the game and became a classic example of product placement in games. In the later "Need for Speed: Underground Hurricane 2", there were a variety of product placements similar to movies.
Not only overseas, but also in the domestic market, such as "Street Basketball" has Coca-Cola commercials, "Peace Elite" has advertisements for JD.com and NetEase Cloud Music, and "Against the Cold Mobile Game" also has Geely China Star advertisements. In addition to the extremely high requirements for the category and world view design of the game, the final effect of advertising is actually difficult to quantify, and the attribution of advertising effect is even more difficult to start, after all, where do players who are immersed in the game have the energy to pay attention to advertising? Therefore, most of these advertisements are brand advertisements that strengthen the brand image, rather than performance advertisements that pursue the input-output ratio.
In fact, what appears more and is more criticized by players in the game is performance advertising, that is, pop-up advertising. A typical example of this is IAA (In-Game Ad Monetization), which earns money by popping ads to players, who in turn earn in-game rewards by watching ads. However, it is easy for people to accept light casual games to engage in free experience + advertising, but adding pop-up ads to large-scale games that require payment is obviously easy to make players boil over.
For example, in 2020, EA released the fighting game "UFC4", but half a month after its release, players suddenly found that a full-screen ad for the second season of the American drama "Black Robe Pickets" appeared in the replay stage of the game.
While real-world fighting matches do have a tradition of interstitial advertising when replaying highlights, EA's operation can be called "close to reality", but after all, reality is reality and games are games. This eventually drew widespread criticism from players on social media, and EA eventually had to apologize, saying, "We actively listened to player feedback about the advertising during replays and slow motion, and we apologize for the inconvenience caused by the fact that the ads have been deactivated." ”
Why is it so rare to combine triple-A games with advertising? The answer is that there is hardly any advertiser and player who can satisfy both the advertiser and the player who pay for it, and it is a high probability that one or the other is compromised. If the cooperation model between "Peace Elite" and JD.com is adopted, that is, similar to the practice of placing advertisements in movies, although it will not affect the game itself, the price is that the advertising effect is difficult to guarantee, and advertisers cannot be persuaded to spend a lot of money to buy such advertising space. Therefore, this kind of trickle and long-term method is obviously difficult to meet the current EA that urgently needs to change its financial situation.
The effect of directly adding pop-up ads in the game is indeed outstanding, but the price is that the player's feeling is to spend money to watch ads, which is almost a corruption of passers-by's popularity, and the company's brand image is used for one-time consumption. Even though EA's reputation among the player base has not been good, if you add full-screen ads to UFC4 a few more times, EA may become a god and hater in the eyes of players.
So while the idea of adding ads to the game and maximizing the player's residual value in the game is promising, at least at this stage, it's still a lot of problems, because EA is too likely to mess it up.