Gaming has always had an audience problem - not a shortage of audience, but a surplus of complexity. Brands entering gaming for the first time quickly discover that the market is fragmented in a way that has no real parallel in traditional media. There is no central buying model, no equivalent to a broadcaster rate card, no single point of entry. The audience is enormous - over 3.6 billion players globally - but it is spread across hundreds of platforms, thousands of titles, and communities that each have their own cultures, expectations, and sensitivities. For media agencies trained on the relative simplicity of TV, social, and search, it has historically been a daunting place to show up.
That is starting to change. The biggest publishers and platforms in gaming are actively building the commercial infrastructure to meet brand money halfway - hiring media sales talent, launching ad products, and going to market in ways designed to speak the language of reach, frequency, and measurable outcomes. The channel is professionalising. And while that makes gaming more accessible, it also raises a genuinely interesting question that the industry hasn't quite resolved yet: in these newer interactive formats, where does advertising end and content begin?
EA is building a media business
Electronic Arts has 700 million registered players across its portfolio - Sims, Madden, EA Sports FC, College Football, Skate, UFC, Apex Legends. That is an audience with the scale of a major broadcaster. For most of EA's history, the primary commercial model around that audience was straightforward: sell the game. Brand partnerships existed at the margins.
That is changing quickly. In mid-2025, EA hired Alex Dao as head of brand partnerships, a newly created role specifically designed to unify its advertising and sponsorships operation. Dao came directly from running global agency and sales partnerships at a major social platform, bringing with him exactly the kind of agency relationships and commercial instincts EA needs to become a credible destination for brand investment. (Adweek, June 2025) He is not the only hire of this kind - EA is actively recruiting across sales, ad operations, ad tech, and partner management, assembling a team that looks more like a media publisher than a game developer.
Their official brand partnerships page now pitches "targeted and measurable in-game ad units that integrate seamlessly into gameplay" alongside "bespoke brand-inspired game content and environments" across titles including Sims, College Football, Apex Legends, and Skate. (ea.com/brand-partnerships) Early brand partners include Discover Financial integrating into College Football 25 and Intersport taking in-stadium digital placements in EA Sports FC 25.
The tension this creates is real and worth naming. As one industry analyst noted, if EA gets its programmatic ambitions right, "they have enough reach in terms of player base that they will dwarf most of the smaller ad tech companies out there." (Digiday, July 2024) But scale alone doesn't resolve the harder question facing every brand entering gaming right now: what does "advertising" even mean when you're inside a game world? A digital billboard in a football stadium feels legible - it maps to something familiar. A branded skin, a sponsored in-game event, a co-created narrative arc in The Sims - these don't map to anything in the traditional playbook. The line between content and ad placement is genuinely blurry, and that is both the challenge and the opportunity.
Discord has built the most honest ad product in gaming
Discord is where 200 million monthly active users live around games - the persistent voice and text layer that runs before, during, and after a session. In 2024, it launched its first ever ad product: Quests.
The format is simple and, by the standards of digital advertising, unusually honest. A brand sponsors a challenge. A user opts in. They complete an action - watching a trailer, playing a game for a set time, streaming with a friend - and earn something real in return: in-game items, avatar decorations, platform currency. No forced impressions, no auto-play, no pre-rolls. Entirely opt-in. In year one Discord ran 70+ campaigns, achieving a 10% acceptance rate with millions of rewards earned. Users who accept one Quest are 3x more likely to accept another. (Discord, March 2025)
Non-endemic brands are already moving in. Wendy's became the first QSR on the platform. Walmart used a Video Quest to drive users into a branded Discord server. Paramount drove over a million Quest engagements for Mission: Impossible. The newest format, Instant Play Quests, uses cloud streaming to let users trial a full game inside Discord with no download required - delivering up to 4x higher new user trial rates in early tests. (Discord, March 2026)
Like EA, Discord has been actively hiring ad sales talent, building a commercial team where none existed before. (Digiday, January 2025) It is pricing at CPMs of roughly $25-30, sold direct rather than programmatically - which means this is still a relationship-led buy rather than something you can access through a DSP.
Here again the content-versus-advertising question gets interesting. When a user spends 20 minutes playing a game they discovered through a Discord Quest, earned a reward they wanted, and came back for more - was that an ad? By the metrics it was. By the experience it was closer to a recommendation from a friend. Gaming platforms are creating formats where the distinction may not matter very much to the user, but matters enormously to how agencies categorise, plan, and buy them.
TikTok mini-games: watch this space
The move easiest to miss right now, but potentially the most significant in terms of where the market is heading, is TikTok quietly building a games platform.
TikTok Minis is live and actively onboarding developers. It's a lightweight mini-game framework built directly into the app - no download, games load inside TikTok against a user base of over 1 billion monthly actives. The current catalogue runs to around 28 titles, mostly casual formats, with favourable early-mover terms for developers. (TikTok for Developers) The brand play hasn't officially launched yet. But the precedent is clear - WeChat mini-program games generated $4.5 billion in ad revenue in China in 2024, and ByteDance has watched that closely. When TikTok opens mini-games to brand partners - and the signals suggest it's a matter of when, not if - it will do so against one of the most engaged mobile audiences on earth.
For brands entering gaming, this is the pattern worth watching: platforms that already own attention moving into interactive formats, and the advertising opportunities following the audience rather than leading it. The market will keep moving fast. It will keep feeling fragmented at the edges. And the question of what counts as media, what counts as content, and what counts as entertainment will keep getting harder to answer - which is probably a sign that something genuinely new is being built.
Want help navigating all this?
It's a dynamic space, and we'll be the first to admit that even keeping up with the shifts takes real attention. We've been building in gaming for long enough to have a view on what's signal and what's noise - and we're always happy to talk through what any of this might mean for a specific brand or campaign brief.
Get in touch - we'd love to help.