EA want to put adverts in your video games to squeeze you for every penny

As if things couldn't get any worse, now EA are looking at ways of putting adverts in video games to squeeze every possible penny from you.

We have mass layoffs with CEOs taking no responsibility, AI being shoved in our faces everywhere possible to eventually replace everyone and now real-world adverts inside our video games too? When will this AAA enshittification of gaming end? Never, obviously. CEOs and their shareholders will never stop chasing every possible extra penny. Growth for growths sake and it simply must continue. Consume consumers!

Writing in their latest Earnings Call, Andrew Wilson - Electronic Arts Inc. - Chairman & CEO said:

"To answer your question on advertising broadly, again, I think it's still early on that front. 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 continues:

"We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences. But more importantly, as we start to build community and harness the power of community beyond the bounds of our games, how do we think about advertising as a growth driver in those types of experiences?"

This only makes me think of that scene in Ready Player One, where they talk about selling up to 80% of your vision for adverts.

Pictured - Ready Player One, Warner Bros. Pictures

Also mentioned in the report is that Apex Legends continues to do well as it "grew 29 points over the last fiscal year" and as for Battlefield? A new one is on the way that "is going to be another tremendous live service". That's…certainly a way to describe an upcoming game.

For Linux and Steam Deck fans, EA are not exactly doing great. Their continued push for their home-grown EA anticheat has been causing problems because it's not supported at all. At least for now Apex Legends is safe with EAC which was just updated.