EA is an interesting beast. As one of the largest and most prominent games makers on the planet, they hold their own unique space in your average gamers’ world. And while EA has been going through a revamping process for longer than I can count, EA’s General Manager of Free-to-play, Ben Cousins, has some interesting things to say about the direction of the company in an interview with Edge.
According to Cousins, EA will be moving further and further away from any in-game advertising based campaigns, focusing more on microtransactions. “We actually aren’t getting much from ad revenue at all,” says Cousins. “The in-game advertising business hasn’t grown as fast as people expected it to.” It’s not that in-game ads are to fault, but rather, Cousins points out the massive and sudden explosion of microtransaction based revenue models, as evidenced by Zynga. “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 isn’t simply making numbers and figures up. You’ll remember when EA jumped into the free-to-play pool, they did so with Battlefield Heroes, which was supported through a mixture of (presumably tested and re-tested) in-game advertising slots 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.”
The interview with Edge arrives just ahead of EA’s newest iteration of a free-to-play Battlefield title hits the streets, Battlefield: Play4Free. He doesn’t quite see this shift at EA as the final nail in the coffin for IGA, but he does note that publishers need to up the bar in the creativity department for the model to be truly compelling, i.e. generate significant revenues.
“We did a deal with Dr Pepper for Battlefield Heroes, where if you buy a bottle and scan in the code you get an exclusive outfit. That kind of deep integration will work, I think, but I’m not convinced that we’ll have billboards in games and things like that. Maybe those days are over.”
Over the course of the year, we’ve seen a massive uptake in microtransactions, while the world of in-game advertising has already said goodbye to one of it’s major players. If Cousins’ is on the right track, could we see another IGA-based shop shutter it’s doors in 2011? Or…will advertisers take Cousins’ and others’ comments to heart and give a serious retooling to their methods?






Announced on the 

Dubbed Dance Groove Online, this new title will be the first fruits of EA’s purchase last December of Seoul, Korea based J2M. This will be J2M/EA’s first western market introduction of the firms several casual online games. Instantly familiar to fans of Dance Dance Revolution and EA’s own Boogie, with the exception of the dance pad and/or wii Remote will be replaced with an 8 key keyboard layout. Not quite the physical workout, but still the same in rhythm fun. And EA isn’t joking around about making this title a success. According to the
While Battlefield Heroes has suffered some 