ContactThe FIFA video game franchise, renamed in 2022 to be EA SPORTS FC, is one of the few behemoth gaming IPs to have reached more than 300 million lifetime unit sales. In 2025, FIFA still leads in total mindshare for licensed IP video game franchises, despite its long-held deal with game developer Electronic Arts ending in 2022. According to business publication Fortune, the franchise has brought in over $20 billion for parent company Electronic Arts since its inception.
Licensed sports simulation video games such as FIFA hold multiple league licenses and carry-over not just the likeness of the athletes, teams and league media assets, but also a handful of league and team sponsorship partners. With the release of a new game, the game's developers will allocate a limited number of advertising spaces to a set number of brands on behalf of the rights holders in their game. However, licensed stadium environments bring vertical restrictions from a brand-advertising point of view. For example, Real Madrid is sponsored by Adidas; thus, Nike or any other apparel business cannot display against perimeter advertising in Real Madrid's Bernabéu stadium.
Although game developers have long offered hard-coded ads inside sports titles and often employ a dedicated sales team for this purpose, most, if any, do not offer addressable playing audiences. In the current paradigm, the game developer pays the rights holder up-front licensing fees to feature brand advertising in their virtual stadium and negotiates a revenue share based on additional revenues generated from unit sales, downloadable content and microtransactions. Where unit sales and microtransactions represent revenue sources that are scalable against demand, the scope of brand advertising is limited by operational inefficiencies related to hard-coded placements. Currently, brand assets are provided by the rights holder via their approved marketing partners and hard-coded into the game environment with one fixed piece of creative per partner, e.g. AXA is in Liverpool's Anfield Stadium with the same advert for the lifetime of the game. Any modifications to these assets depend on the availability of engineering resources, compete with other requests for development time, and require a manual game update by the player before the changes become visible.
This rigid model was starkly exposed in FIFA 22: although EA swiftly removed all Russian national and club teams from the game after the invasion of Ukraine, perimeter advertising for Russian energy company Gazprom remained in virtual stadiums throughout the game, highlighting the need for a more dynamic, real-time solution.
Game developers and rights holders need to work together, but their current way of working is fiscally uneven, operationally inefficient, and, as a result, limited in scope. The presence of rights holder IP in sports simulation video games is a prerequisite to commercial success, but given the size, scale and denomination of global sports franchises, leagues and teams, up-front licensing costs are often prohibitively expensive, as evidenced by EA’s decision to part ways with FIFA after nearly three decades, citing an unsustainable cost of continued rights renewal. The following year, EA committed approximately £500 million over six years to retain the English Premier League license, further underscoring the enormous cost of top-tier sports IP. In 2025, microtransactions, in-game rewards and additional revenues outside of base game sales represent the majority of EA’s business. The "live services and other" segment accounted for more than 73% of the company’s $7.56 billion in 2024 revenues, up from 66% in 2020. If EA SPORTS FC is to evolve from an annual release into a true live-service forever game, then hard-coded placements are sure to evolve alongside it, by necessity, to become addressable to different playing audiences.
The future of licensed sports simulation video games hinges on building a more sustainable commercial model. Sports simulation video games are the most logical fit for in-game advertising, given that brands are present across every sport and sports property. Given the funding required to develop games like FIFA, including licensing and production costs, developers must evolve beyond rigid agreements for static, hard-coded adverts.
By integrating dynamic in-game placements designed for targeted distribution, game developers can generate net-new revenues through regional brand deals, have more leeway to lower up-front licensing costs through carriage deal negotiations based on audience and campaign measurement, and incentivise rights holders’ presence and active participation in their games.
On the other hand, rights holders gain new freedom and flexibility to diversify and scale sponsorship in a way that doesn't conflict with existing deals, across different markets, languages and audiences, to unlock regional brand partners and better serve the next generation of global sports fans who are playing inside their virtual stadium.
As the value of media rights continues to dwindle and fluctuate, the world of sport is embracing a new generation of digital technologies to diversify and supplement revenues. Just look at the rise of geo-targeted overlays and virtual ad replacements in live broadcast feeds. With every gaming platform now connected to the internet by default, the integration of dynamic ad placements in sports simulation video games has never made more sense.
