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EA CEO Comment about in-game ads resulted in some hilarious social media replies

Addleburg

Addleburg

The Fallen
Nov 16, 2017
5,080
Firefly said:
It 100% is. I think it was all removed in the Remaster though.

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It's funny - I love Alan Wake and even replayed the original as recently as this past December. And in my head I thought, "Oh, like the Duracell batteries they had in Alan Wake 1," only to see your post and remember they were actually Energizer. So much for the efficacy of the ad in my case, heh.

In Alan Wake 1, he's also driving (I think) a Lincoln SUV when he shows up that's then changed for the remake they did.

Temp_User said:
Crazy Taxi remains for me as the best use and arguably, the only acceptable use of ads in-game. Places like KFC and Tower Records serve as landmarks in navigating the map and feels natural to the game given its arcadey and irreverent tone - and the fact that you are playing as a taxi driver delivering people to local places and sh1t.

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I genuinely loved the real shops and stores in the original Crazy Taxi. I'm not a fan of them being replaced by generic, fake stores in the ports.
 
mute

mute

â–˛ Legend â–˛
Member
Oct 25, 2017
25,442
That is pretty much the experience watching a playthrough on Twitch these days.
 
Jubilant Duck

Jubilant Duck

Member
Oct 21, 2022
6,190
Temp_User said:
Crazy Taxi remains for me as the best use and arguably, the only acceptable use of ads in-game. Places like KFC and Tower Records serve as landmarks in navigating the map and feels natural to the game given its arcadey and irreverent tone - and the fact that you are playing as a taxi driver delivering people to local places and sh1t.

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Funnily enough, that wasn't advertising.

Brands didn't want to be associated with games at the time so SEGA had to pay them to license the brands they specifically thought would make for a better game by increasing the "real world" factor. Definitely a good call.
 
Zephy

Zephy

Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,213
ResetGreyWolf said:
But YouTube is free. If you have the paid version of YouTube, you'll have an ad-free experience.
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For now. Then they'll introduce tiers to their subscription so you get different amounts of ads based on how much you pay.

Just look what Amazon did with price. They already jacked up the price 50% last year, and now they added ads to the paid subscribers unless we pay even more.
 
Cipherr

Cipherr

Member
Oct 26, 2017
13,519
Temp_User said:
Crazy Taxi remains for me as the best use and arguably, the only acceptable use of ads in-game. Places like KFC and Tower Records serve as landmarks in navigating the map and feels natural to the game given its arcadey and irreverent tone - and the fact that you are playing as a taxi driver delivering people to local places and sh1t.

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I.... never actually thought about that. Of course it was a long time ago. But yeah, that didn't actually bother me.

Maybe it was because of the Taxi delivery setting? Heh. REALLY good example.
 
Jonathan Lanza

Jonathan Lanza

"I've made a Gigantic mistake"
Member
Feb 8, 2019
6,920
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mf's will look you straight in the eye and tell you that this is the work of an auteur. (and I'm not even a Kojima hater)
 
TeenageFBI

TeenageFBI

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,369
Temp_User said:
Crazy Taxi remains for me as the best use and arguably, the only acceptable use of ads in-game. Places like KFC and Tower Records serve as landmarks in navigating the map and feels natural to the game given its arcadey and irreverent tone - and the fact that you are playing as a taxi driver delivering people to local places and sh1t.

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I also really like the product placement in the Pikmin games.

Well, I can't quite remember if there was product placement in 3 and 4, but Pikmin 1 and 2 had some fun objects to find. Olimar's comments on them are pretty clever too.
 
Razgriz-Specter

Razgriz-Specter

Member
Oct 25, 2017
29,905
I saw someone on Twitter asking if you could imagine Activision doing this with COD..
I said

Yes
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Also an old Ubisoft one
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huge chunk of the cars in Rainbow 6 Vegas were all Dodge
 
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AstralSphere

AstralSphere

Member
Feb 10, 2021
9,472
CosmiKu said:
With advertising it always starts off small or low key, and they demand more and more of your attention as time goes on.

Just look at YouTube ads. They started off as short ads at the start of the video, skippable after 5 seconds. Then the time it took to skip the ads got progressively longer and longer until you couldn't skip them anymore.

Then an ad appeared at the end of the video.

Then adverts appeared in the middle of the video.

Then you get 2 unskippable ads at the start of the video.

Then you get an extra 2 unskippable ads less than 1 minute into the video, with more coming every 5 minutes.

Now YouTube ads are so bad, they're hijacking Apple TV screensavers when your video is paused, stopping your device from going to sleep and pumping adverts into your living room. It's grotesque.
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Yeah, this stuff is a sliding scale. Ad delivery always is, there always has to be more revenue.

What EA are proposing will likely be fairly benign, but eventually over the years it'll get worse and eventually lead to these joke tweets being a reality.

The only question is how long it takes to reach that point. The end point is inevitable though.
 
Rahfiki

Rahfiki

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,039
John Harker said:
Are we on average too young to recall that in game advertising as very much a multi hundred million dollar business not that long ago? And that every publisher under the sun was doing it fairly frequently as an alternative revenue stream?

It only lessened as advertising dollars went to sponsoring streamers and YTers to be around game advertising instead of in-game, and was seen as a way of helping grow awareness and reach of titles to sell titles, and grow platforms.

But now that's sort of stagnating and many FtP games don't rely on game sales as much, it's all about time spent in game and engagement with said game, so now publishers, devs, and advertisers are dusting off the old playbooks to bring in incremental revenue off activity player engagement again. Whats old is new again!
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I don't know if it's even an age thing. I'm kinda thinking it's more a knock-on effect of the fact that way more people are actually aware of and paying attention to these sorts of thing now than they were 10 years ago. Just like every few years people rediscover that Riccitello quote about paying to reload your gun, assume he came up with the idea, and therefore he's the evil ruining gaming. As soon as he's gone the day is saved!

Completely missing the fact that Microsoft has lowkey been talking about and angling for in-game purchases like that since at least 2005 and that Riccitello quote didn't happen until like 2010/1 iirc.

The industry has never really changed much. Companies tend to be consistent. The in-game ads coming back was always inevitable. I think now it's just a question of how many dark patterns will we have to dodge that devs didn't know about 10 years ago.
 
ManOfWar

ManOfWar

Member
Jan 6, 2020
2,506
Brazil
finaljedi said:
American sports really lean hard into this, things that happen in the game have sponsors even in person live. "That double is brought to you by Anderson restoration" "We have a substitution brought to you by Penn Station subs". I went to a baseball game with a friend a few weeks back and we kept joking about the fact that every single action taken seem to have a sold sponsor attached to it.
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Exactly. Given time, a culture which builds this as something normal will definitely make games full of ads.
 
Dremorak

Dremorak

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,808
New Zealand
I think they mean like in the menus and stuff, which would still suck if its full priced, but if they had a $10 version of the latest games with Ads in the menu I wouldn't be completely against it
 
Caesar III

Caesar III

Member
Jan 3, 2018
925
In splinter fell they advertised airwaves gum, irrc!

The bk ads in gameplay up there are amazing, that looks like something Andrew Wilson would do and I hate it
 
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