According to an interview with EA CEO John Riccitiello, analysts predicting in-game advertising as the next booming industry are a little too hopeful. Riccitiello does agree that this facet of the video game market will eventually flourish, but he believes it will be a long time before it gets to the level of expectations that has been created.
"You can’t be as bullish as analysts are on in-game advertising and be sane," he said. "In-game ad expectations are wildly high."
Riccitiello’s comments come in response to industry insiders such as Bernie Stolar, head of Google’s AdSense for games, who recently made a bold prediction that in-game advertising would become a USD billion dollar industry by 2010. Other analysts at the technology research firm Yankee Group, also have speculated the industry of in-game advertising to grow to USD 971 million dollars by 2011.
At the moment, in-game ads account for USD 30 million-a-year business for EA, Riccitiello claims, which is just a tiny fraction of the company’s USD 3.1 billion in sales in fiscal 2007. He also claims that EA has been slow to implement more in-game advertising due to the difficulty it has take to develop and program games for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, claiming "the industry needs to ‘execute’ better to create sufficient room to place ads within games."