EA was one of the first adopters of in-game advertisement and - based on their experience - they believe that in-game advertising isn't as profitable as it once seemed to be.
"We actually aren't getting much from ad revenue at all. The in-game advertising business hasn't grown as fast as people expected it to," Ben Cousins, the general manager of EA's free-to-play division, told Edge. "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 then explained that for Battlefield Heroes, they used both "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. I'm not convinced that we'll have billboards in games and things like that. Maybe those days are over."
