The company justified the decision by calling it a quadruple-A game, but the players didn’t fall for this marketing tactic.

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Skull and Bones was a commercial flop, and players have shown companies their anger for trying to squeeze more money out of players for full-price games including Deluxe Editions, Advanced Access, and in-game microtransactions.

It seems publisher EA is looking at a different option to these models, and wants to include more ads in its full-price games.

EA is best known for its sports games, but publishes games in a variety of genres such as The Sims, Apex Legends, and Mass Effect.

As reported by The Verge, EA CEO Andrew Wilson had a lot to say about the topic in the most recent quarterly earnings call.

Speaking to shareholders, he 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.

“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.”

Adverts have long been implemented in EA’s games with the most obvious example being the sponsorships seen in its sports games like EA Sports FC 24.

Players are generally forgiving of this kind of advertising as it often reflects how the sport looks in real life.

However, there has been some pushback against other ways EA has implemented adverts into its games.

Previously, EA collaborated with H&M to put 60 outfits in The Sims 2 and charged players £10/$10 for them.

Reviewers like Steve Hogarty called out the practice in his infamous PC Zone review, which called the content pack “unmitigated bum”.

It seems players are discerning about the types of adverts they are willing to be served in games, so this recent reveal has fans nervous for the future of games from the publisher.

If you want to read more about gaming drama, check out the contract that tried to stop negative reviews of Marvel Rivals.

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