Electronic Arts, more commonly referred to as EA recently submitted a patent that looks to overhaul advertisement in the world of gaming. As usual, patents can be a bit difficult to read by the untrained eye, but there are a few tidbits that stand out amongst the rest of the technical jargon. The main takeaway from the patent is what EA is calling Automated Player Sponsorship, a method for sponsors to match up with players automatically based on a certain set of criteria decided on by the sponsor ahead of time. This could be beneficial for both sponsors and gamers.
It's no secret that gamers in the public eye tend to get sponsorships from various companies. Whether this is eSports players, content creators, streamers, or something else, this helps the gamer to fund their endeavors while putting the sponsor's product in front of a lot of viewers. Electronic Arts' Automated Player Sponsorship System could make this process a lot easier on both ends.
In the patent, EA mentions that sponsors sometimes have a difficult time finding players that meet their criteria. It's important that the moral values of a sponsored party line up with those of the sponsors, and the type of content may also matter. For example, Babies R Us probably wouldn't want to sponsor a gaming channel that focuses primarily on R Rated horror games. That's an extreme example of course, but it does show that there's room for improvement in the way that sponsors find players to sponsor.
This of course stands to benefit the sponsors and may help more creators get sponsored sooner, but it will also have an effect on the viewing experience of games as well. Usually, sponsorships in YouTube videos for example take the form of a brief shoutout at the beginning or end of the video, but EA seems to have a different vision for this. When discussing the limited advertisement space that sponsors struggle with, EA suggests a solution in "rendering gameplay content with the advertising content together such that the advertising content is displayed along with the gameplay content during runtime of the video game, so that both are viewable at the same time."
This is just a patent, so players shouldn't expect to see anything come from this anytime soon. These things take time, and more often than not EA will make an announcement about its new system when the time comes for that. Until then, content creators may want to keep a close eye on this, as it could drastically change how sponsorships work in the near future.