Thoughts on Jim Sterlings video about Advertisements in games?

[monnef]

Sorry for multi posting, but the forum was showing me untranslated error message...

That didnt exist before the Playstation 2 (thats when the usage of middleware became dominant). And it saves a lot of money and developing time. So this isnt anymore "The developers trying to squeezing out a few more fps from their game engine which takes a lot of money and time on that complex hardware". No its a function call with the parameters defined by your models.

I am not sure about Playstation 2 era, but it definitely existed before almost every AAA company started using engines from others. Only every studio had their own engine which they used for dozen of games. It just started to make more sense financially recently (well, years ago) because commercial engines were/are more feature rich with great tooling and costs have gone down a lot (how much costs unity or unreal now? even indies can use them). Also if you are doing something engine is not exactly built for, you still will have to write a lot of lower level stuff yourself (e.g. generating of voxel terrain meshes). Some studios do modify engines they paid for, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to optimize it enough. And there are still studios which have their own engines (e.g. Bethesda or Blizzard).

But I agree a lot of money (percentage-wise, not sure about absolute numbers) is going now to graphics and marketing instead of programming.

[Zeno]

Torn on the issue really.
Ads in games SOMETIMES make more sense than not having them (Racing/Sports/Open World) so in those instances, I don't really mind them.
Other games have ads blatantly forced into them where they don't belong, so in those games I have an issue with it. If they allowed you to buy a copy of a game that was much cheaper, but had ads on billboards/newspapers/TVs/Trucks/Etc, and also a copy that was more expensive, but didn't have the ads, I would support it within reason. Or even the ability to turn ads off across the board would be best.

[[Formerly]NEET]

For me, SFV ads placement seems silly and out of place. Like, ads placement on Dhalsim's skulls neclace? Dahey, man... People may disagree on me in this, i like FFXV's type of ads in the game.

[aileron]

If it has an ad on it in RL then it could have an ad on it ingame? I'd prefer joke/sarcastic ads ingame though, playing off of real ads in RL.

[OzzieArcane]

NEET;n21208]For me, SFV ads placement seems silly and out of place. Like, ads placement on Dhalsim's skulls neclace? Dahey, man... People may disagree on me in this, i like FFXV's type of ads in the game.

This was the biggest problem. If it was just on TVs in the background of certain stages (which they were also doing) I wouldn't have had an issue with it. But putting the ads directly on the character's outfit? The characters in Street Fighter aren't NASCAR drivers, for the majority of them having ads plastered on their clothes would be out of character and immersion breaking.

[Animusisters]

I want more advertisements for the sake of immersion.

[sarbonn]

I remember when we were working on Motoracer 2 and they wanted to put all sorts of advertisements in on the roadways (kind of something you'd expect EA to do). They managed to avoid it, but I do remember one point where we were waiting days before we could move with content because we were all waiting on corporate to decide what types of advertisements they were going to add (before not doing it at all). That was probably the longest point of waiting in on a game that I could ever remember. Hated advertisements ever since just because of that.