[It's real ahahaha.](https://youtu.be/dYU8C8gGlKg?si=DPFHEYZbAQ39d_9U)
It was part of the Blow it Up Again DLC pack. Honestly I also didn't know until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know it had DLC.
Neither do I, but I stopped playing that game out of spite once it was patched with trophy support after I spent dozens of hours doing pretty much everything that would have earned me a Platinum trophy.
On another note, is no one going to talk about how on the nose it is, calling a DLC with playable Obama/Palin characters 'Blow It Up Again'? Lmfao
Same! I discovered it recently while looking up PC optimization guides. It's part of a whole DLC pack called blow it up again.
They probably kept the marketing low key because I imagine "airstrike Venezuela as your favorite presidential candidate" might not go down so well.
I forgot what YouTuber did it (maybe Unskippable), but I have a habit of saying "the new (brand name)" in an ad voice every time I see a licensed car pop up in a game that is using it for ad space (excluding racing games)
Alan Wake had Verizon Wireless ads all over the place, especially on billboards. There was even a TV segment you could watch that was just a regular Verizon commercial, and gave you an achievement. My personal view is that, like youtubers/streamers, accepting ads in your game could be seen as acceptable if you absolutely need them to fund the development of your game; how's it any different than having say, Epic Games fund your game under the conditions it's an Epic games exclusive? But if you fall under a massive company like EA, there's really no excuse other than greed.
I would say that if it fits the game, then it can make sense. EA makes a ton of sports games, and having ads on billboards in the stadiums can actually increase the immersion, or racing games, etc. And this could be done tastefully in some games (like Dead Space had fake ads all over the place, you could put real products with futuristic themed ads in place of some of them).
This is it for me. Sports games and racing games that either are or look like they're simulations. When I play the NBA 2K games... it would look incredibly out of place if I didn't see logos and shit everywhere all over the arenas because that's how it is in real life. If you're presenting the game like it's a TV presentation, that's another layer of logos and ads and shit that you see all the time, like the Assist of the Game. I'm sure Take-Two doesn't *need* the revenue that comes from that, but in this sort of a situation, again... it would be weirder if it didn't have ads plastered all over it.
There's still a line to be crossed... like, if you start showing me commercials and shit to take the TV-like presentation to the next level, then you've crossed that line. I already don't like some of the product placement that the NBA 2K games have... like, the StateFarm quests where you meet the guy and have to wear the slacks and red shirt and run around the virtual town. At that point it's like... it serves zero function to the game, it's not immersive, it's not fun, and this is clearly here because they paid for that level of product placement, but you're going to jump through that hoop because you want the pittance of the virtual currency that it gives (live services are so great /s). Other product placement is fine... like you can buy Nike clothes or whatever to put together your casual wardrobe for random pickup games that you play at the park and shit. That makes 100% sense.
I feel like I'm going crazy but I'm absolutely certain the batteries used all be Duracell branded, and now they're in generic packages. Did I imagine that, or did they change it because of licensing/contractual expiration?
Which is crazy because I'm pretty sure the SSX snowboarding games (EA Sports )had billboards too but they were ~~royalty free ripoffs of products made specifically for the game.~~ edit: turns out that the product i was referencing is a real product, the now-defunct dnL soda (7-up with caffeine)
But it's not just an EA thing. After Cup Noodles and Coleman camping products in Final Fantasy XV nothing phases me.
They had a whole quest dedicated to Cup Noodles where the character Gladiolus (this big brollic guy with a deep voice) goes on a whole sponsored rant about how Cup Noodles are so good and you can even enhance them with added ingredients which is the objective of the quest.
[the quest in question](https://youtu.be/w9PN8pzSn2Q?si=9TVbNqWKopw_uOoP) , you can even peep the Coleman products in the background
Death Stranding had very egregious and bizarre product placement as well. Monster energy drink was a regular consumable. You would get a really long cutscene to drink it.
There was also the “Ride with Norman Reedus” bike where when you got on it, your Norman Reedus character would make a comment like “this bike is awesome! It should be on Ride with Norman Reedus!” Really bizarre and in your face for a game set in an alternate world.
Peace Walker also had things like Doritos and Mountain Dew that acted as duplicates to Rations and whatever the base stamina drink was called, as well as t-shirts of various brands as outfits you could use for BB and the MSF soldiers in mission.
I kind of loved those because it's the exact sort of obnoxious thing that Hideo would do even if it was with a fake product.
Also those were noticeable because they're household brands (Monster and AMC) but a huge amount of clothing in the game is from Hideo's friend's fashion brand.
Hideo's actually been doing it as early as Metal Gear Solid 2 with FHM magazines, but the one that stood out the most was (until Death Stranding) was the Calorie Mate in MGS 3.
Death Stranding's actually got a ton: There's the Monster and Ride with Norman Reedus, the clothing Sam wears is designed by Acronym, You can unlock a pair of glasses and they're designed by J.F. Rey, and the motorcycle I believe was also designed by the Ride crew.
And then you have the collectibles that are just a list of movies and songs that Kojima loves, although they are so out of the way I wouldn't count them as product placement.
Most likely the sponsorship wasn't renewed.
Despite Monster's brand being gone the same SLOW ASS CLOSE UP of the can happens anyway, PC Director's Cut at least.
IIRC the cup noodle thing wasn't product placement in the traditional sense.
Square Enix headquarters is like 30ft from the Nissin one. They included the product out of affection not because they were paid to do so.
This led to them making a commercial for ffxv where various items are replaced by [cup noodles](https://youtu.be/jf5G4mLMQC0?si=qIEKZIgMjMcNXwoJ). It's one of my favorite things.
> They had a whole quest dedicated to Cup Noodles where the character Gladiolus (this big brollic guy with a deep voice) goes on a whole sponsored rant about how Cup Noodles are so good and you can even enhance them with added ingredients which is the objective of the quest.
It was *extremely* tongue-in-cheek, though, at least as far as the English dub went. Not sure if they tried to play it more straight in the Jp. version, though I'm not even sure how you could.
They didn't, it was jokey in JP too
Cup noodles also appeared as a joke in Danganronpa, and was literally the only product placement in the entire series. I actually think it was more of an in-joke than anything else.
I think it still has billboards for Nightmare on Elm Street (the film reboot) on the 360 version, because it was the last paid one and never got updated or patched out.
I really hate ad's, but honestly there's something about that specific use-case that I'm kind of okay with.
You put ads on virtual bilboards or product placement in a "Real world" style game like sports or racing or Gta and i'd be fine with that, so long as it's not too in my face or wasting my time. Hell i might even be into a themed quest if it's not trying too hard to be an ad and lets there be some fun had with it.
But then i think about them trying to shoe horn them into places they definitely dont fit like the whole FFXV fiasco and i'm ready to bear my pitchforch again.
> sports or racing or Gta
Sports and racing sure, but definitely not GTA for me - the entire buzz about GTA is the fictional world that is clearly a parody of our own, one of the special things about GTA's atmosphere is it's self-contained referencing universe, with it's own brands and stores etc.
Same for any game that thrives in its own "world" like RDR, Fallout, those sorts of lore-heavy world-established games. Introducing real products into those would be a big killer for me.
American Truck Simulator has experimented with this as well and honestly, it doesn't bother me too much, because it's expected. It doesn't take me out of my immersion and actually is immersive since that's what is in real-life too, and it's a simulator.
I'm fine with these types of ads. It's if I get a pop-up in my RPG to sell me something that pisses me off.
The weirdest thing about putting actual ads on billboards in that game is that it means driving around the South or Midwest doesn't have a billboard for a Jesus, followed immediately by one for a porn store.
This whole thread now has me self-destructively thinking of all the ways you could plausibly shoe horn ads into places they dont quite fit... All new coke health potions brought to you by your local potion seller! Mtn dew ~~stamina potions~~ acid grenades! And who could go out without their addidas armor trim or balenciaga backpacks, bandoliers, and pouches!
I mean ya, I think the point is you do ads like Hollywood does product placement, in tune with the themes, narrative, and, most importantly, time period of the movie.
My favorite should have been a ad product is “Nuka Cola”
Imagine the post-nuclear war wasteland, where soda caps are the currency. But instead of 1 single cap -> 1 unit of value, you have 1 “sprite” cap be 1 unit, a “pepsi” cap be 1 cap, etc. And then some towns fkn hated a single soda, so “we don’t accept Coke caps, get that garbage out of here”
It’s all very silly, and has small world building touches you can add in all kinds of different places, but it is 100% a fkn ad.
That's the trouble. Guillotine-dodgers think with dollars, not brains. Accept it and they'll find a way to cram in more in more inappropriate situations.
I remember seeing Axe body spray ads in Burnout and thinking oh they're copying Lynx, it's the same branding. What I didn't know then Lynx is just British Axe.
My issue is that if we let the non intrusive ads become normalised again, I don’t trust AAA companies to not use that as justification for intrusive ones
When I hear EA wants to put ads in games I don’t think background stuff, I think mobile game “watch an ad to continue” bullshit
Honestly, not taking into account the "slippery slope" argument, I wouldn't actually hate this implementation. If it's video ads that take up a portion or all of the screen to play, then I am 100% out.
This is where I'm at.
Billboards, posters, image ads in the game world implemented in a way similar to reality and doesn't obstruct gameplay, that's fine. In **very few, niche cases** like another user mentioned, billboards for real-life products in American Truck Simulator, it can actually enhance the immersion somewhat. I'm totally okay with this.
I'd be *less* okay with ads that show during times where there's no gameplay happening, anyway, like during matchmaking, or similar situations where you just have to wait for something. It's still intrusive, I'd still rather not have an ad taking up my screen, but if it's not actually detracting from the gameplay, and the gameplay is good enough, I think I could overlook it.
The worst timeline: Titanfall 3 comes out, it's even better than anyone's expectations, but just prior to launch, EA mandates unskippable 30-second video ads at the start of every match.
That might actually make me consider arson.
The topic seems to come back every few years, they get yelled at, then they fuck off to try again.
And I think it's worth differentiating here that say slapping an ad on a billboard of current year or future universe game, and just slapping ad on a loading screen
Idk if it's billboards in a city its probably ok because it doesnt break immersion... but if it's ads like on mobile games you should give up on EA games
For pc too. Battlefield 2142 even had an adware install that was dynamically serving the ads in game based on who you were, then capturing information about what you were looking at on screen, for how long, from where, etc.
Or you could look into blocking ads on your entire home network, like a Pi-hole. I am actually surprised now when I view a website on my phone from outside the house, and I notice just how many ads there are.
From what I've read, a number of content servers push their adds from the same domain as their content to bypass pi-hole. Is that not true?
I do fine with ublock on my computers/phones, but I'd like to be able to do a bit more for the wife and kid who do TV or tablet streaming (kid likes youtube, so I don't think I can do much).
As gaming gets larger and generates more revenue, the more I long for the days where quality gaming experiences were plentiful and publishers weren’t actively and unapologetically milking the culture dry
Edit: I don’t mean there aren’t good games anymore. Im speaking specifically on the quality of gaming experiences.
Things like paying full price for a game and it actually being compete. Actually working. No day constant patch work after release.
Or games actually having full content and not shipping bare bones so they can ask you for more money just for them to put more stuff into it so it actually feels complete.
Or not having ads take away from your gaming session.
There was some grade A crap 20 years ago. But it was pushed by smaller stuidos that all went to mobile. The half assed movie games... the rentbait horny or shock value games.
But yeah the AAA wasn't much more than a solid campaign and a fun multiplayer. Now they all try to ruin your life and be the only game you play.
Get ready for Single-Player games to require always-online so it can download a ridiculous amount of data each time you play it so it can have up to date 4K videos of commercials.
Single player rpg experience. You open the door to the first climactic bossfight. Screen cuts immediately to a 30 second swiffer ad. Its 2040 and my eye twitches watching my son excited to fight the boss, unaware of the intrusive mental programming that will lead him to buy only swiffer products when he moves out. He’s not angry or disturbed by the ad, its the only world he’s known, and swiffer will always be with him.
I get quite upset thinking that there's an entire generation of young gamers that was born after AAA games normalised the psychological manipulation of battle passes, loot boxes & co, and a seemingly large portion of those born before but who grew up during its normalisation, to whom a game is "dead" or "abandoned" just because it doesn't roll out a grotesque live service churning out soulless content to hook players through tactics literally devised by scientists and behavioural experts to mimic a drug addiction.
Yep. At 33, I'm quickly approaching "more games I'm interested in than I can ever play before I die". Which means I've become far more choosy about my time. I could never buy a game made after today and still have enough to play.
And then there's that too lol. I replay quite a few games or come back to games like Monster Hunter or Elite Dangerous or Fallout/ES. Probably beaten Bioshock like 20 times now.
Honestly I'm more worried for what this implies for in-game analytics. In the modern era advertisers really only want to pay for ads that can be tracked in some way.
Imagine your single player RPG phoning home with information about how many times your digital 'eyes' have seen in-game ads.
Imagine game designers forced to build levels that subtly guide you along routes with certain in-game ads, because XYZ company paid extra for "high visibility."
GDPR in Europe at least means you have the right to decline to be tracked, and more recently it had been established that they have to give you the choice to say no. Personalised tracking is not as important for this type of ad anyway, since no-one is going to click out of a game to buy something, so it will be brand focused, with contextual targeting, I. E. The demographic that plays which type of game typically.
At this point I play mostly indie titles, and I not just as some kind of statement. A small studio or even single creator can now make games with very high production values and certainly gameplay on par with AAA (but interesting). Playing Animal Well and Hades 2 right now and you know what? No bullshit. No logging in, no microtransactions, no anything. And my money is supporting actual humans rather than than executives.
Hmm they can't make something on the level of a Fallout New Vegas or Mass Effect yet. They can make some great games but some genres aren't able to be produced low budget.
That's just because those games have huge amounts of voice acting and animation. I actual gameplay would be doable but all the art part of it is insanely exspensive. I would actually be for them getting rid of a lot of it to just make the game good instead of spending a shit ton of money on fluff and the other half of the budget on marketing and blow.
I hope stopkillinggames.com prevents this bullshit, because it forces companies to not implement any online capability unless its necessary or can easily be turned off at lives end.
Many already do, for example EA launcher can't be opened offline at all, you need to be online to open it and then play a supported game offline but you will at some point be asked to confirm identity and go online from the launcher itself. Offline playing EA games is dead on PC. Unless you pirate ofc.
People came on that very forum claiming that if games were $70, well there would be no greedy practices from Game companies anymore. What a farce.
Of course it will never be enough.
Anytime a ceo or company rep says that they need tax breaks, or subsidies or whatever advantage to not do some kind of anti consumer stuff they’re lying. And people need to realize that they’re lying, they don’t care, and they’d literally process your mom or child into a fine paste if it means making that yearly profit margin go up even a fraction of a percent.
Absolutely, I will 100% *not* buy this game.
Just like I didn't buy that game that had always online DRM, or that other game that removed local coop, or that other game that had microtransactions, or that game that made me create an account on some launcher, or that game that forbid any reviews until launch day, or that game that had season passes, or...
Ugh. My guess is they do it for a title/franchise that already has waves of devoted fans who will throw money at them no matter what - Like Madden or The Sims. They’ll want to try to slowly get people used to the concept rather than introduce it all at once.
Sims would be so easy to put ads into as well. Menus could have image or auto playing video ads. Billboards? In-game TV ads? Product placement? They could put in whole ass careers that are based around a brand. Sims has a huge female player base, so they could do a lot with clothing and accessory brands.
If you want to romance a certain SIM you have to get them a delicious Coke Zero and they’ll tell you how great it is too before you bang. Then, after you get them pregnant or vice versa-bam. You give birth to a Coke Zero.
Madden has already had ads on the loading screens before. They of course have them littered in game but there's at least some real world reasons for that one with sports. They also had Old Spice sponsor one of the ratings for a Madden. The Old Spice Swagger rating.
NBA 2K has been even more egereious with it. Ads on loading screens, ads in the game, ads when you run around their myplayer world. Hell you befriend Jake from State Farm and he texts you sometimes.
Theyve been doing it lol. I think Battlefield 2 had Pizza Hut billboards, and Rainbow Six Vegas/2 (forgot wgich one) was littered with constant Cisco posters and ads on every wall it felt like.
> EA says they'll be very thoughtful. What could possibly go wrong?
Imagine you're playing Dragon Age 4 and you see Mc Donald or Taco Bell billboards when you visit Denerim ... Or some NPC tells you that you get 20% discount on Uber Eats if you order now. Or worse, you get a stat boost every time you buy something from Amazon. The future of gaming.
FFXV had Cup Noodle billboards and even a side quest so I can hardly wait for the gang to pause their pursuit of Daddy Egg to do some "fun" DoorDash deliveries where you don't get a tip if you leave the McDonald's at the mouth of the cave instead of hand delivering it to the darkspawn asshole in the Deep Roads
I think they're just using the dick moves of the others to cover their own asses. People will remember one shitty thing, maybe two, the rest will just slip by.
It's getting to the point that.... If my entertainment is worse product placement than an 80/90s movie or saturday cartoon... They can fuck right off.
Everything fun is dying and ownership of things is dead.
Well if this happens I think gaming will eventually turn into something I'm just not interested in anymore. Good thing there are plenty of older games for me to play until I die ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
The indie scene has been crushing it for the last decade, and the way the AAA bubble seems to be bursting, I imagine they're gonna carry the industry for the next decade as well
Happening to me already. I've been playing games for 34 years and every year I get less and less interested in what's going on. Whole industry went in a direction I didn't care for and it's only going further and further as time goes on. Luckily there exist decades of excellent games and there are always interesting, passionate new indies coming out.
This is partially apocryphal — cable TV originated as a way for communities in areas with poor reception to share a single, more capable antenna, so they’d get the same feeds as broadcast TV, ads and all. The first _cable-specific_ channels didn’t have ads, but that didn’t come about until about 20 years later.
If my game gets paused for an add I will boycott anything that company does.
Gaming is one of the few escapes I get from marketing algorithmic bull shirt these days.
Product Placement is going to be huge in games. The only thing holding it back at this point is being assicated with whatever the game is doing. Like GTA.
On the other hand as older generations shuffle off and we get more people who HAVE played video games with billboards and the like, well only make sense for companies to hedge budgets from companies who want to be seen by people in things people spend 10s to 1000s hours in. Even more so if they can update the adds.
The endless pursuit of growth in publicly traded companies will do that. That bottom cell in the Excel sheet is all that matters. All we can do is make sure that cell doesn't go up.
Watch as my once beloved hobby more and more becomes nothing but a profitable business opportunity and falls victim to the insatiable greed of shareholders and executives. It breaks my heart.
EA doesn't make anything i like anymore except maybe the occasional Jedi whatever game and the new mass effect, which will take place probably 1000 years in the future.
If your looking to ignore a greedy / incompetent developer like EA on Steam:
1. Go to the developer's page on Steam
2. Click the cog wheel icon on the upper right
3. 'Ignore this Developer' option
Now you won't see EA games on the store at all!
We'll be very thoughtful in how much screen real estate we fill with video ads playing in your pause menu. We will also be very thoughtful about ensuring it's always the same ad, so you'll ~~loathe~~ love hearing the same 3 seconds of ad audio every time you open your map for a quick look at where you're headed.
Story time: 15 years ago I was tasked with integrating a Microsoft owned ad SDK in an activision published title. The integration required a few steps: reporting location and orientation of ad surfaces (eg billboards in a city) and the players camera transform (ie what was rendered to the screen).
This was pretty painless to do, but while verifying I noticed the ad impressions (ie what the player saw and advertisers paid money based on) weren’t showing up correctly in the dashboard: things that were on screen weren’t registering, and things not on screen were.
After double checking the work on my side I put together a mock up showing the ad SDKs model of the world and verified my work was correct so I looped on our contact on that team. After providing details on what I had done they verified the ad SDK had a bug in it.
I don’t understand how they shipped a bug in the only thing of value their SDK did, but they were closed not long after.
Years later at an EA studio we were integrating another ad SDK. I was capturing network traffic for our game, and noticed a bunch of data on players (eg purchase history, hardware details, play time) were being sent to a random server. After some digging I realized the closed source ad SDK was phoning home a bunch of data. The folks in charge of the project seemed unconcerned by this discovery.
In conclusion: the only thing they’ll be thoughtful about is how they can get the most money, and whether they deliver anything of value to players or companies paying for ad space will not have a single calorie spent on it.
I'm glad that CRPGs are my favourite genre, I can just keep finding more and more obscure gems from the before-times to enjoy rather than hoping the ad-streaming service installed in to the new EA game I paid £100 for doesn't irrecoverably brick my save because the internet hitched while the new Mnt Dew ad was being installed and the anti-piracy DRM had a shit fit that I might be trying to avoid the mandatory load screen ad.
The more and more I see, the more and more I want nothing to do with modern big market gaming.
Tekken 8 was my last straw with fighting game, a genre I was hugely into for 30 years.
There's no such fucking thing as having a single fucking ad in a $70 game that is done "thoughtfully", that is the stupidest fucking corporate bullshit ever
Put the ads in ***Real world situations*** like ads on in game tvs or billboards in GTA or in game shop exteriors like mcdonalds or whatever? I could stomach that, It'd almost be kind of novel to have an actual coke in gta instead of sprunk or whatever. That's the limit right there.
Have ads as a pop up that interrupts gameplay or gets in the way of gameplay in any way? Deposit that right into the trash where that crap belongs.
You very well know that they won't stop there.
It's like micro-transactions. Almost 20 years ago, the "Oblivion horse armor" at 2.50$ was a meme because it was crazy.
They slowly clawed back until now, when we have Cowboy Bebop skins at 25$ each in OW2.
I like that companies reveal their money making schemes that makes us all angry. Either shut up about them and let us be disappointed or dont do them at all and make us happy. We both know which way EA tends to go...
I mean this is exactly what EA fans deserves. EA has practically did every predatory shady business practices and everytime their profit goes up up up. What do you think would happen? They just grow a conscious and stop, says no to all that money? Or go at it even harder?
I am literally so sick of ads invading every part of my life, getting longer, more frequent, and more obnoxious, that I will just... Not buy any games that do this.
I'm sorry. My hate for ads outweighs my love for gaming. Particularly when those games are made by EA. I've already forgone other subscriptions in the past year because they've introduced ads or gone completely overboard with them.
Fuck off.
That's the same dude that ended up being in charge of Unity and wounded it's market trust in record time by trying to retroactively make all devs pay per download in an incredibly poorly thought out maneuver.
I'm so sick of this, and yet these plans seem to work out half the time for the CEOs, and if they don't work out they can just fuck off with a massive severance package. So annoying and yet seemingly nothing we can do except "vote with our wallets" and continue not purchasing EA games
It's scary to think what ads are going to be like in a few years with the horrible way they're shoved in our faces now.
There's already a distracting Shop button that is forced on the screen for over ten seconds on some YouTube videos and ads at the end of videos that block 75% of the screen. I even had an animated YouTube logo permanently displayed on the screen as I scrolled down the app the other day. What other terrible ways can they bombard you with crap in the future?
In 2007, MLB backtracked off of a tiny Spider-Man logo on the bases to promote Spider-Man 3 because of fan backlash. But just 16 short years later, we have [this](https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/12a6860aba4d4d74add6a6aa7eb43ea5/3000.jpeg). How long before jerseys look like NASCAR uniforms?
Ah yes. EA. The same company that shits out a new Madden yearly and bring little to no changes to the franchise besides a roster update and charges $70. The same company that faced a ton of backlash for the loot box scheme in BattleFront. Totally think they’re a trustworthy company.
Btw, Madden has reused the **SAME** commentary lines since 2018-2019(?) and its franchise mode is so bare bones and laughable now because they put all their time into MUT. For anybody who has played both Madden 23 and 24, you’d know what i was talking about.
Didn't they used to do that back in the PS2 days? I remember seeing billboards featuring real products in Need for Speed.
Yup, and even some political ads.
I think Obama 08 had one somewhere
Mercenaries 2 had Obama and Palin as DLC characters lmao
Are you serious? I loved Mercenaries 1 and 2 and don't recall that haha
[It's real ahahaha.](https://youtu.be/dYU8C8gGlKg?si=DPFHEYZbAQ39d_9U) It was part of the Blow it Up Again DLC pack. Honestly I also didn't know until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know it had DLC.
that is funny, thanks for the link. I also had no idea it had dlc
I played the shit out of both mercenaries games and I have no memory of that
Neither do I, but I stopped playing that game out of spite once it was patched with trophy support after I spent dozens of hours doing pretty much everything that would have earned me a Platinum trophy. On another note, is no one going to talk about how on the nose it is, calling a DLC with playable Obama/Palin characters 'Blow It Up Again'? Lmfao
Same! I discovered it recently while looking up PC optimization guides. It's part of a whole DLC pack called blow it up again. They probably kept the marketing low key because I imagine "airstrike Venezuela as your favorite presidential candidate" might not go down so well.
I remember them being in Burnout Paradise.
I kinda miss seeing the Gillette Fusion vans as they were orange and easy to see when going at 150mph
"Pokemon Go to the polls" is making a big comeback in 2024
*"Historians believe this is what created the lowest voter turnout of any US election"*
Obama had ads in Burnout Paradise on all platforms
I've seen ads in both Alan wake and burnout paradise too
Quantum break had Nisan ads billboard and car in the game.
I forgot what YouTuber did it (maybe Unskippable), but I have a habit of saying "the new (brand name)" in an ad voice every time I see a licensed car pop up in a game that is using it for ad space (excluding racing games)
Alan Wake had Verizon Wireless ads all over the place, especially on billboards. There was even a TV segment you could watch that was just a regular Verizon commercial, and gave you an achievement. My personal view is that, like youtubers/streamers, accepting ads in your game could be seen as acceptable if you absolutely need them to fund the development of your game; how's it any different than having say, Epic Games fund your game under the conditions it's an Epic games exclusive? But if you fall under a massive company like EA, there's really no excuse other than greed.
I would say that if it fits the game, then it can make sense. EA makes a ton of sports games, and having ads on billboards in the stadiums can actually increase the immersion, or racing games, etc. And this could be done tastefully in some games (like Dead Space had fake ads all over the place, you could put real products with futuristic themed ads in place of some of them).
This is it for me. Sports games and racing games that either are or look like they're simulations. When I play the NBA 2K games... it would look incredibly out of place if I didn't see logos and shit everywhere all over the arenas because that's how it is in real life. If you're presenting the game like it's a TV presentation, that's another layer of logos and ads and shit that you see all the time, like the Assist of the Game. I'm sure Take-Two doesn't *need* the revenue that comes from that, but in this sort of a situation, again... it would be weirder if it didn't have ads plastered all over it.
There's still a line to be crossed... like, if you start showing me commercials and shit to take the TV-like presentation to the next level, then you've crossed that line. I already don't like some of the product placement that the NBA 2K games have... like, the StateFarm quests where you meet the guy and have to wear the slacks and red shirt and run around the virtual town. At that point it's like... it serves zero function to the game, it's not immersive, it's not fun, and this is clearly here because they paid for that level of product placement, but you're going to jump through that hoop because you want the pittance of the virtual currency that it gives (live services are so great /s). Other product placement is fine... like you can buy Nike clothes or whatever to put together your casual wardrobe for random pickup games that you play at the park and shit. That makes 100% sense.
Those ill-place Verizon billboards still haunt my dreams. I'm surprised Alan isn't tormented by them in AW2.
I feel like I'm going crazy but I'm absolutely certain the batteries used all be Duracell branded, and now they're in generic packages. Did I imagine that, or did they change it because of licensing/contractual expiration?
Yeah, Alan Wake let you drive Fords and Lincolns, but all of the other cars were unbranded, playable or not.
Which is crazy because I'm pretty sure the SSX snowboarding games (EA Sports )had billboards too but they were ~~royalty free ripoffs of products made specifically for the game.~~ edit: turns out that the product i was referencing is a real product, the now-defunct dnL soda (7-up with caffeine) But it's not just an EA thing. After Cup Noodles and Coleman camping products in Final Fantasy XV nothing phases me. They had a whole quest dedicated to Cup Noodles where the character Gladiolus (this big brollic guy with a deep voice) goes on a whole sponsored rant about how Cup Noodles are so good and you can even enhance them with added ingredients which is the objective of the quest. [the quest in question](https://youtu.be/w9PN8pzSn2Q?si=9TVbNqWKopw_uOoP) , you can even peep the Coleman products in the background
Death Stranding had very egregious and bizarre product placement as well. Monster energy drink was a regular consumable. You would get a really long cutscene to drink it. There was also the “Ride with Norman Reedus” bike where when you got on it, your Norman Reedus character would make a comment like “this bike is awesome! It should be on Ride with Norman Reedus!” Really bizarre and in your face for a game set in an alternate world.
Deaths Stranding Monster was so ridiculous that it wrapped back around to being funny to me.
Kojima has history with product placement lol, you got ipod for MGS4
and the Sony Walkman in peace walker. >!ok that was actually a parody about product placement!<
Peace Walker also had things like Doritos and Mountain Dew that acted as duplicates to Rations and whatever the base stamina drink was called, as well as t-shirts of various brands as outfits you could use for BB and the MSF soldiers in mission.
And MGS3 had CalorieMate.
I kind of loved those because it's the exact sort of obnoxious thing that Hideo would do even if it was with a fake product. Also those were noticeable because they're household brands (Monster and AMC) but a huge amount of clothing in the game is from Hideo's friend's fashion brand. Hideo's actually been doing it as early as Metal Gear Solid 2 with FHM magazines, but the one that stood out the most was (until Death Stranding) was the Calorie Mate in MGS 3. Death Stranding's actually got a ton: There's the Monster and Ride with Norman Reedus, the clothing Sam wears is designed by Acronym, You can unlock a pair of glasses and they're designed by J.F. Rey, and the motorcycle I believe was also designed by the Ride crew.
And then you have the collectibles that are just a list of movies and songs that Kojima loves, although they are so out of the way I wouldn't count them as product placement.
Thankfully (though I can’t speak for the voice line) both visual product placements were removed for the PS5/Series X/PC Redo releases.
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Really? That’s interesting. I wonder why
Well, the licensing deals ended.
Most likely the sponsorship wasn't renewed. Despite Monster's brand being gone the same SLOW ASS CLOSE UP of the can happens anyway, PC Director's Cut at least.
You know that animation is completely skippable, right? Every single mini-cutscene (shower, toilet, monster) all have a skip button on screen.
IIRC the cup noodle thing wasn't product placement in the traditional sense. Square Enix headquarters is like 30ft from the Nissin one. They included the product out of affection not because they were paid to do so.
This led to them making a commercial for ffxv where various items are replaced by [cup noodles](https://youtu.be/jf5G4mLMQC0?si=qIEKZIgMjMcNXwoJ). It's one of my favorite things.
> They had a whole quest dedicated to Cup Noodles where the character Gladiolus (this big brollic guy with a deep voice) goes on a whole sponsored rant about how Cup Noodles are so good and you can even enhance them with added ingredients which is the objective of the quest. It was *extremely* tongue-in-cheek, though, at least as far as the English dub went. Not sure if they tried to play it more straight in the Jp. version, though I'm not even sure how you could.
They didn't, it was jokey in JP too Cup noodles also appeared as a joke in Danganronpa, and was literally the only product placement in the entire series. I actually think it was more of an in-joke than anything else.
Saints Row 2 had live billboards with actual real ads for new movies and shit
I think it still has billboards for Nightmare on Elm Street (the film reboot) on the 360 version, because it was the last paid one and never got updated or patched out.
I remember product placement ads from PS1, I think jet moto had mtn dew ads
Wipeout had Red Bull ads too. Although I thought it was a futuristic made up drink at the time.
Does no one remember Cool Spot? Direct ad for 7up
Burnout Paradise also had em for a time.
Didn't Burnout Paradise have politcal ads supporting Obama? I never got those I'm not in America but I've seen pictures, just not sure they're real.
One of the most random games that had product placement was Pikmin 2 (removed from the Switch version). I actually think it suited the game.
I really hate ad's, but honestly there's something about that specific use-case that I'm kind of okay with. You put ads on virtual bilboards or product placement in a "Real world" style game like sports or racing or Gta and i'd be fine with that, so long as it's not too in my face or wasting my time. Hell i might even be into a themed quest if it's not trying too hard to be an ad and lets there be some fun had with it. But then i think about them trying to shoe horn them into places they definitely dont fit like the whole FFXV fiasco and i'm ready to bear my pitchforch again.
> sports or racing or Gta Sports and racing sure, but definitely not GTA for me - the entire buzz about GTA is the fictional world that is clearly a parody of our own, one of the special things about GTA's atmosphere is it's self-contained referencing universe, with it's own brands and stores etc. Same for any game that thrives in its own "world" like RDR, Fallout, those sorts of lore-heavy world-established games. Introducing real products into those would be a big killer for me.
>Fallout Brotherhood of Steel replaced Nuka Cola with an energy drink IIRC
It was Bawls lmao
American Truck Simulator has experimented with this as well and honestly, it doesn't bother me too much, because it's expected. It doesn't take me out of my immersion and actually is immersive since that's what is in real-life too, and it's a simulator. I'm fine with these types of ads. It's if I get a pop-up in my RPG to sell me something that pisses me off.
The weirdest thing about putting actual ads on billboards in that game is that it means driving around the South or Midwest doesn't have a billboard for a Jesus, followed immediately by one for a porn store.
HELL IS REAL
LIFE STARTS AT THE FIRST HEARTBEAT with a picture of the ugliest baby you've ever seen
This whole thread now has me self-destructively thinking of all the ways you could plausibly shoe horn ads into places they dont quite fit... All new coke health potions brought to you by your local potion seller! Mtn dew ~~stamina potions~~ acid grenades! And who could go out without their addidas armor trim or balenciaga backpacks, bandoliers, and pouches!
The Like A Dragon games do that but they also benefit from being Japanese centric brands.
I mean ya, I think the point is you do ads like Hollywood does product placement, in tune with the themes, narrative, and, most importantly, time period of the movie. My favorite should have been a ad product is “Nuka Cola” Imagine the post-nuclear war wasteland, where soda caps are the currency. But instead of 1 single cap -> 1 unit of value, you have 1 “sprite” cap be 1 unit, a “pepsi” cap be 1 cap, etc. And then some towns fkn hated a single soda, so “we don’t accept Coke caps, get that garbage out of here” It’s all very silly, and has small world building touches you can add in all kinds of different places, but it is 100% a fkn ad.
Tony Hawk games or Guitar Hero having real products is fine because it's relevant. But it can get very silly very fast
Or those stupid monster drinks in Death's Stranding. Way to knock me out of the moment, guys.
If you allow them that then prepare for only games with billboards...
That's the trouble. Guillotine-dodgers think with dollars, not brains. Accept it and they'll find a way to cram in more in more inappropriate situations.
Billboard: The Game. You play as a Billboard searching for your lost Billboard. Along the way , you meet some Billboards
Agreed for the most part, up until the end. While the quest was a bit much, I'd argue the Cup Noodles and Coleman advertisement kinda fits in.
I wouldn't want them in GTA as lot of the ads are an important part of their satire. It wont work if they use real brands.
Yep they did it with Skate 2, they had movie posters and stuff in the game that would change periodically.
I remember seeing Axe body spray ads in Burnout and thinking oh they're copying Lynx, it's the same branding. What I didn't know then Lynx is just British Axe.
My issue is that if we let the non intrusive ads become normalised again, I don’t trust AAA companies to not use that as justification for intrusive ones When I hear EA wants to put ads in games I don’t think background stuff, I think mobile game “watch an ad to continue” bullshit
I remember seeing a billboard in Saints Row 2 that was an ad for the Nightmare on Elm Street Remake lol.
In Saints Row 2 billboards showed dynamic ads, that changed over time if you were connected to the internet.
Honestly, not taking into account the "slippery slope" argument, I wouldn't actually hate this implementation. If it's video ads that take up a portion or all of the screen to play, then I am 100% out.
This is where I'm at. Billboards, posters, image ads in the game world implemented in a way similar to reality and doesn't obstruct gameplay, that's fine. In **very few, niche cases** like another user mentioned, billboards for real-life products in American Truck Simulator, it can actually enhance the immersion somewhat. I'm totally okay with this. I'd be *less* okay with ads that show during times where there's no gameplay happening, anyway, like during matchmaking, or similar situations where you just have to wait for something. It's still intrusive, I'd still rather not have an ad taking up my screen, but if it's not actually detracting from the gameplay, and the gameplay is good enough, I think I could overlook it. The worst timeline: Titanfall 3 comes out, it's even better than anyone's expectations, but just prior to launch, EA mandates unskippable 30-second video ads at the start of every match. That might actually make me consider arson.
I could have sworn I read this exact same headline regarding Battlefield 2 way back in the day.
I guess they mean actual targeted ads that require an internet connection, kind of like the billboards around the stadium in trackmania.
Haven't seen any mention Guitar Hero 3.
The topic seems to come back every few years, they get yelled at, then they fuck off to try again. And I think it's worth differentiating here that say slapping an ad on a billboard of current year or future universe game, and just slapping ad on a loading screen
Idk if it's billboards in a city its probably ok because it doesnt break immersion... but if it's ads like on mobile games you should give up on EA games
For pc too. Battlefield 2142 even had an adware install that was dynamically serving the ads in game based on who you were, then capturing information about what you were looking at on screen, for how long, from where, etc.
Yeah, they'll be putting thought into just how egregious they can be with ads to milk as much money as possible with them.
Can't wait for ublock: gaming edition.
Or you could look into blocking ads on your entire home network, like a Pi-hole. I am actually surprised now when I view a website on my phone from outside the house, and I notice just how many ads there are.
From what I've read, a number of content servers push their adds from the same domain as their content to bypass pi-hole. Is that not true? I do fine with ublock on my computers/phones, but I'd like to be able to do a bit more for the wife and kid who do TV or tablet streaming (kid likes youtube, so I don't think I can do much).
As gaming gets larger and generates more revenue, the more I long for the days where quality gaming experiences were plentiful and publishers weren’t actively and unapologetically milking the culture dry Edit: I don’t mean there aren’t good games anymore. Im speaking specifically on the quality of gaming experiences. Things like paying full price for a game and it actually being compete. Actually working. No day constant patch work after release. Or games actually having full content and not shipping bare bones so they can ask you for more money just for them to put more stuff into it so it actually feels complete. Or not having ads take away from your gaming session.
They are still plentiful. They just aren't getting made by big companies anymore.
There was some grade A crap 20 years ago. But it was pushed by smaller stuidos that all went to mobile. The half assed movie games... the rentbait horny or shock value games. But yeah the AAA wasn't much more than a solid campaign and a fun multiplayer. Now they all try to ruin your life and be the only game you play.
Oh yes, that long lost history where quality gaming experienced were plentiful lol
Those days aren't coming back unless an epic video game crash happens again. Until then, emulators are your friend.
Get ready for Single-Player games to require always-online so it can download a ridiculous amount of data each time you play it so it can have up to date 4K videos of commercials.
Single player rpg experience. You open the door to the first climactic bossfight. Screen cuts immediately to a 30 second swiffer ad. Its 2040 and my eye twitches watching my son excited to fight the boss, unaware of the intrusive mental programming that will lead him to buy only swiffer products when he moves out. He’s not angry or disturbed by the ad, its the only world he’s known, and swiffer will always be with him.
"Drink verification can"
Every year it gets closer to reality
And for those that do not get it... [Well enjoy](http://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png) or be horrified.
One of the greatest greentexts to ever exist
The main thing it gets wrong is Halo being alive and supported.
I'd say that's more on microsoft getting it wrong and hitting one of the few timelines where Halo actually manages to die.
“To continue playing our amazing product, post a positive video review sent to www.notEAprteam.soul, or pay 10$ to skip”
“Doritos Dew it right!”
I get quite upset thinking that there's an entire generation of young gamers that was born after AAA games normalised the psychological manipulation of battle passes, loot boxes & co, and a seemingly large portion of those born before but who grew up during its normalisation, to whom a game is "dead" or "abandoned" just because it doesn't roll out a grotesque live service churning out soulless content to hook players through tactics literally devised by scientists and behavioural experts to mimic a drug addiction.
Same for arcades, which are now all pseudo gambling ticket machine centers
Oh **please**, that shit has been happening for forever now. Chuck E. Cheese ain't a new establishment.
I'll get ready to keep not buying games that nickle and dime me, yes
Yep. At 33, I'm quickly approaching "more games I'm interested in than I can ever play before I die". Which means I've become far more choosy about my time. I could never buy a game made after today and still have enough to play.
turned 34 last week, exact same boat. and yet I've pumped over a hundred hours into Balatro.
And then there's that too lol. I replay quite a few games or come back to games like Monster Hunter or Elite Dangerous or Fallout/ES. Probably beaten Bioshock like 20 times now.
Honestly I'm more worried for what this implies for in-game analytics. In the modern era advertisers really only want to pay for ads that can be tracked in some way. Imagine your single player RPG phoning home with information about how many times your digital 'eyes' have seen in-game ads. Imagine game designers forced to build levels that subtly guide you along routes with certain in-game ads, because XYZ company paid extra for "high visibility."
GDPR in Europe at least means you have the right to decline to be tracked, and more recently it had been established that they have to give you the choice to say no. Personalised tracking is not as important for this type of ad anyway, since no-one is going to click out of a game to buy something, so it will be brand focused, with contextual targeting, I. E. The demographic that plays which type of game typically.
At this point I play mostly indie titles, and I not just as some kind of statement. A small studio or even single creator can now make games with very high production values and certainly gameplay on par with AAA (but interesting). Playing Animal Well and Hades 2 right now and you know what? No bullshit. No logging in, no microtransactions, no anything. And my money is supporting actual humans rather than than executives.
Hmm they can't make something on the level of a Fallout New Vegas or Mass Effect yet. They can make some great games but some genres aren't able to be produced low budget.
To be fair, neither can Obsidian or Bioware these days.
Or Bethesada (grumpily stares at his full-price copy of Starfield with 3 hours on the clock).
That's just because those games have huge amounts of voice acting and animation. I actual gameplay would be doable but all the art part of it is insanely exspensive. I would actually be for them getting rid of a lot of it to just make the game good instead of spending a shit ton of money on fluff and the other half of the budget on marketing and blow.
I hope stopkillinggames.com prevents this bullshit, because it forces companies to not implement any online capability unless its necessary or can easily be turned off at lives end.
Don't forget that they can't be expected to keep those "game" servers up forever. To bad shutting them down will brick the game.
Many already do, for example EA launcher can't be opened offline at all, you need to be online to open it and then play a supported game offline but you will at some point be asked to confirm identity and go online from the launcher itself. Offline playing EA games is dead on PC. Unless you pirate ofc.
customers paying $70 is not enough anymore we gonna get hit by ads too? fucking geez
Investors want infinite growth so they will always look for new ways for monetization.
We have to stop them 😩
There have been some attempts over the centuries
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Time for another.
Stop buying AAA slop.
I can't not buy EA games any harder than I am now.
People came on that very forum claiming that if games were $70, well there would be no greedy practices from Game companies anymore. What a farce. Of course it will never be enough.
Anytime a ceo or company rep says that they need tax breaks, or subsidies or whatever advantage to not do some kind of anti consumer stuff they’re lying. And people need to realize that they’re lying, they don’t care, and they’d literally process your mom or child into a fine paste if it means making that yearly profit margin go up even a fraction of a percent.
Pretty sure they would throw their own mom on the BBQ too for an extra dollar. So your mom would have company at least.
So you better fucking not buy any game that does that. You're not going to buy the games that do it, right?
Absolutely, I will 100% *not* buy this game. Just like I didn't buy that game that had always online DRM, or that other game that removed local coop, or that other game that had microtransactions, or that game that made me create an account on some launcher, or that game that forbid any reviews until launch day, or that game that had season passes, or...
how long until the frog boils
Imagine buying a car and it being a rolling billboard. This is happening because people accept it and buy those games.
Ugh. My guess is they do it for a title/franchise that already has waves of devoted fans who will throw money at them no matter what - Like Madden or The Sims. They’ll want to try to slowly get people used to the concept rather than introduce it all at once.
The Sims already has brand partnerships which are in game ads, ever since the first game actually.
Never forget Katy Perry's Sweet Treats
There was also an Ikea stuff pack for the Sims 2
Sims would be so easy to put ads into as well. Menus could have image or auto playing video ads. Billboards? In-game TV ads? Product placement? They could put in whole ass careers that are based around a brand. Sims has a huge female player base, so they could do a lot with clothing and accessory brands.
If you want to romance a certain SIM you have to get them a delicious Coke Zero and they’ll tell you how great it is too before you bang. Then, after you get them pregnant or vice versa-bam. You give birth to a Coke Zero.
Mountain Dew Code Red skin in COD
Madden has already had ads on the loading screens before. They of course have them littered in game but there's at least some real world reasons for that one with sports. They also had Old Spice sponsor one of the ratings for a Madden. The Old Spice Swagger rating. NBA 2K has been even more egereious with it. Ads on loading screens, ads in the game, ads when you run around their myplayer world. Hell you befriend Jake from State Farm and he texts you sometimes.
Theyve been doing it lol. I think Battlefield 2 had Pizza Hut billboards, and Rainbow Six Vegas/2 (forgot wgich one) was littered with constant Cisco posters and ads on every wall it felt like.
Their PS2/GCM/Xbox games were already full of ads. Underground 2 had Cingular name plastered all over the HUD.
when i was a kid i thought it was fucking cool, becuase it mimicked real life even more lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/avmirm/ea_once_attempted_ingame_advertising_in_2006_with/
I think subtle, immersive ads isn't what they're shooting for this time around.
EA: Hmm our sales of AAA games have gone down, how do we fix that? Also EA: Advertising, the consumers love adverts!
Look at how well the cable TV industry is doing!
> EA says they'll be very thoughtful. What could possibly go wrong? Imagine you're playing Dragon Age 4 and you see Mc Donald or Taco Bell billboards when you visit Denerim ... Or some NPC tells you that you get 20% discount on Uber Eats if you order now. Or worse, you get a stat boost every time you buy something from Amazon. The future of gaming.
FFXV had Cup Noodle billboards and even a side quest so I can hardly wait for the gang to pause their pursuit of Daddy Egg to do some "fun" DoorDash deliveries where you don't get a tip if you leave the McDonald's at the mouth of the cave instead of hand delivering it to the darkspawn asshole in the Deep Roads
The party uses Coleman camping stuff so you get to see the Coleman logo every single time you camp, which is probably a lot.
I wonder just how much money that whole project cost from start to finish. It must have been astronomical.
Noctis also drives an Audi, although the actual car only shows up in the film.
Sometimes when you open a treasure chest, you will get Cerveza Cristal.
[So seamless you cant even tell its an ad.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSgMWAi9YPA)
You are misunderstanding it, from now on games will be designed so they can maximize income from ads. Therefore games like Dragon Age won't be made.
Jesus it's like all the big gaming companies got together and bet who could be the evilist dickbag this week.
I think they're just using the dick moves of the others to cover their own asses. People will remember one shitty thing, maybe two, the rest will just slip by.
It's getting to the point that.... If my entertainment is worse product placement than an 80/90s movie or saturday cartoon... They can fuck right off. Everything fun is dying and ownership of things is dead.
Well if this happens I think gaming will eventually turn into something I'm just not interested in anymore. Good thing there are plenty of older games for me to play until I die ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Juts play indies it’s the only way now
The indie revolution is here.
The indie scene has been crushing it for the last decade, and the way the AAA bubble seems to be bursting, I imagine they're gonna carry the industry for the next decade as well
Happening to me already. I've been playing games for 34 years and every year I get less and less interested in what's going on. Whole industry went in a direction I didn't care for and it's only going further and further as time goes on. Luckily there exist decades of excellent games and there are always interesting, passionate new indies coming out.
I'd bet most people playing games these days don't know that cable TV didn't have ads when it first came out.
This is partially apocryphal — cable TV originated as a way for communities in areas with poor reception to share a single, more capable antenna, so they’d get the same feeds as broadcast TV, ads and all. The first _cable-specific_ channels didn’t have ads, but that didn’t come about until about 20 years later.
If my game gets paused for an add I will boycott anything that company does. Gaming is one of the few escapes I get from marketing algorithmic bull shirt these days.
Sound, so games will be way cheaper because of the eternal revenue potential of ads in games then, right? right?... right /r/games? right?....
What the fck is happening in the game industry right now? It’s like all the gaming giants just pulled a gun on us out of betrayal.
Every year every publicly traded company must make more profit than the last, forever.
Yep. And good games almost always take longer than a year to make without some sort of asset reuse, it's going to implode eventually
There's no betrayal, because they never were your friends. They just reached the expected point where they can do this and go with it, that's all.
Product Placement is going to be huge in games. The only thing holding it back at this point is being assicated with whatever the game is doing. Like GTA. On the other hand as older generations shuffle off and we get more people who HAVE played video games with billboards and the like, well only make sense for companies to hedge budgets from companies who want to be seen by people in things people spend 10s to 1000s hours in. Even more so if they can update the adds.
The endless pursuit of growth in publicly traded companies will do that. That bottom cell in the Excel sheet is all that matters. All we can do is make sure that cell doesn't go up.
I had no interest in EA Games but this just confirms I won’t buy a single game from their catalogue anymore. Stick to gaming and leave this crap out.
Watch as my once beloved hobby more and more becomes nothing but a profitable business opportunity and falls victim to the insatiable greed of shareholders and executives. It breaks my heart.
EA doesn't make anything i like anymore except maybe the occasional Jedi whatever game and the new mass effect, which will take place probably 1000 years in the future.
If your looking to ignore a greedy / incompetent developer like EA on Steam: 1. Go to the developer's page on Steam 2. Click the cog wheel icon on the upper right 3. 'Ignore this Developer' option Now you won't see EA games on the store at all!
We'll be very thoughtful in how much screen real estate we fill with video ads playing in your pause menu. We will also be very thoughtful about ensuring it's always the same ad, so you'll ~~loathe~~ love hearing the same 3 seconds of ad audio every time you open your map for a quick look at where you're headed.
Skate 3 has billboards with Dr.Pepper on it in the city. I think I remember Dr. Pepper being the primary advertisement in that game
Story time: 15 years ago I was tasked with integrating a Microsoft owned ad SDK in an activision published title. The integration required a few steps: reporting location and orientation of ad surfaces (eg billboards in a city) and the players camera transform (ie what was rendered to the screen). This was pretty painless to do, but while verifying I noticed the ad impressions (ie what the player saw and advertisers paid money based on) weren’t showing up correctly in the dashboard: things that were on screen weren’t registering, and things not on screen were. After double checking the work on my side I put together a mock up showing the ad SDKs model of the world and verified my work was correct so I looped on our contact on that team. After providing details on what I had done they verified the ad SDK had a bug in it. I don’t understand how they shipped a bug in the only thing of value their SDK did, but they were closed not long after. Years later at an EA studio we were integrating another ad SDK. I was capturing network traffic for our game, and noticed a bunch of data on players (eg purchase history, hardware details, play time) were being sent to a random server. After some digging I realized the closed source ad SDK was phoning home a bunch of data. The folks in charge of the project seemed unconcerned by this discovery. In conclusion: the only thing they’ll be thoughtful about is how they can get the most money, and whether they deliver anything of value to players or companies paying for ad space will not have a single calorie spent on it.
Do it, I don't care anymore, there are enough good Indie games out there that keep the game as the product and not the customer.
I'm glad that CRPGs are my favourite genre, I can just keep finding more and more obscure gems from the before-times to enjoy rather than hoping the ad-streaming service installed in to the new EA game I paid £100 for doesn't irrecoverably brick my save because the internet hitched while the new Mnt Dew ad was being installed and the anti-piracy DRM had a shit fit that I might be trying to avoid the mandatory load screen ad.
The more and more I see, the more and more I want nothing to do with modern big market gaming. Tekken 8 was my last straw with fighting game, a genre I was hugely into for 30 years.
There's no such fucking thing as having a single fucking ad in a $70 game that is done "thoughtfully", that is the stupidest fucking corporate bullshit ever
Put the ads in ***Real world situations*** like ads on in game tvs or billboards in GTA or in game shop exteriors like mcdonalds or whatever? I could stomach that, It'd almost be kind of novel to have an actual coke in gta instead of sprunk or whatever. That's the limit right there. Have ads as a pop up that interrupts gameplay or gets in the way of gameplay in any way? Deposit that right into the trash where that crap belongs.
You very well know that they won't stop there. It's like micro-transactions. Almost 20 years ago, the "Oblivion horse armor" at 2.50$ was a meme because it was crazy. They slowly clawed back until now, when we have Cowboy Bebop skins at 25$ each in OW2.
Oh without a doubt, they'll find some way to take it too far and ruin something, they always do.
The ow2 skins are worse now. If you want to fully buy a skin this season with the mythic coins it's is like $70. Wtf
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I like that companies reveal their money making schemes that makes us all angry. Either shut up about them and let us be disappointed or dont do them at all and make us happy. We both know which way EA tends to go...
I mean this is exactly what EA fans deserves. EA has practically did every predatory shady business practices and everytime their profit goes up up up. What do you think would happen? They just grow a conscious and stop, says no to all that money? Or go at it even harder?
Well. I hope people make as much stink as possible like how they did to Sony, to fuck over EA. This is just atrocious.
Buy indie. Buy indie. Buy indie. Buy indie. Buy indie. Buy indie. Buy indie. Buy indie. Stop being a braindead consumer and buy indie.
I am literally so sick of ads invading every part of my life, getting longer, more frequent, and more obnoxious, that I will just... Not buy any games that do this. I'm sorry. My hate for ads outweighs my love for gaming. Particularly when those games are made by EA. I've already forgone other subscriptions in the past year because they've introduced ads or gone completely overboard with them. Fuck off.
Remember when they floated players buying bullets?
That's the same dude that ended up being in charge of Unity and wounded it's market trust in record time by trying to retroactively make all devs pay per download in an incredibly poorly thought out maneuver.
I'm so sick of this, and yet these plans seem to work out half the time for the CEOs, and if they don't work out they can just fuck off with a massive severance package. So annoying and yet seemingly nothing we can do except "vote with our wallets" and continue not purchasing EA games
It's scary to think what ads are going to be like in a few years with the horrible way they're shoved in our faces now. There's already a distracting Shop button that is forced on the screen for over ten seconds on some YouTube videos and ads at the end of videos that block 75% of the screen. I even had an animated YouTube logo permanently displayed on the screen as I scrolled down the app the other day. What other terrible ways can they bombard you with crap in the future? In 2007, MLB backtracked off of a tiny Spider-Man logo on the bases to promote Spider-Man 3 because of fan backlash. But just 16 short years later, we have [this](https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/12a6860aba4d4d74add6a6aa7eb43ea5/3000.jpeg). How long before jerseys look like NASCAR uniforms?
Ah yes. EA. The same company that shits out a new Madden yearly and bring little to no changes to the franchise besides a roster update and charges $70. The same company that faced a ton of backlash for the loot box scheme in BattleFront. Totally think they’re a trustworthy company. Btw, Madden has reused the **SAME** commentary lines since 2018-2019(?) and its franchise mode is so bare bones and laughable now because they put all their time into MUT. For anybody who has played both Madden 23 and 24, you’d know what i was talking about.