Thoughts on Jim Sterlings video about Advertisements in games?

[RevolverGirl]

https://youtu.be/FU63IKkVYxs

Apearantly there is something going on in Street Fighter V about adding sponsered ads all ovee the gane where it doesn't fit, I dont play SF anymore so I just learned about this today. And it can be toggled off. But he does have a point that this could lead into more less subtle implementation in the future.

My worry is that eventually we will have straight up in-game commercials, and I dont think its that unrealistic of a possibility at this point.
So what do you think about this, is this something to get worried over or should we be concerned.

[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.

[Animusisters]

I want more advertisements for the sake of immersion.

[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.

[PriestTroit]

Most gamers don't care because it's not as big a deal as others pretend it is. You're fooling yourself if you think all "scummy monetization" is equal across the board.... and you're robbing yourself of playing good games because of it.

[PriestTroit]

Gotta agree. The most popular games these days require more staff, more graphics, more voiced dialogue, original soundtracks with full orchestras, and all that jazz than they used to. Then throw in the fact that gamers have so much access to information about games from competitors meaning you've gotta up the ante in terms of marketing just to get a customer's notice. It's not surprising that antics like this have popped up.

[Gertbeefrobe]

Yer part of the problem and the target of all that marketing money. Now I'm off to check up on my drug farm and human leather furniture corp in Rimworld. A game I learned about from a forum.

[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.

[[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.

[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.

[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.

[monnef]

There is no optimizing anymore when you use for example the Unreal Engine. You use it as a library within your source and then call the according graphics function with the correct parameters. A ten year old child with a one week development education could do that correctly.

There definitely is going a lot of optimizing even on "scripting" level. Because it is not as easy as you describe (e.g. spawning whole world filled with enemies will choke any system, so you have to write custom logic for that). Sure, if you have one scene, few lights, one fixed number of objects, trivial game logic, then yes, this is true. But even vast majority of indie games are not that simple. You still have to at least create shaders (and optimize them) to have somewhat unique looks, handle loading (nobody wants loading screens, so asset streaming, splitting to bundles and what not), game logic itself (which you usually will be optimizing in multiple passes), since games are about gameplay (this part takes enormous amount of time, careful planning, selecting algorithms, structures, architecture), not just rendering a scene as you describe. And I oversimplified and forgot for sure many more things.

[monnef]

Stardew Valley probably cost $280.

Seriously? That is like 3-4 work days for not well paid web dev to earn in quite cheap country in central Europe. Developing a non-trivial game takes many months, usually years. The real cost of developing something like Stardew Valley will be IMO at least 2 orders higher - 28,000$ could last for a year of development for one person and probably not in US. People are seriously all the time underestimating cost of developing games and software in general.

[Aidy]

That "salary" isn't all cash though, it's stock etc too. Activision are more of an exception rather than the rule though, it's a huge company with many successful titles under its belt so it's not surprising they make more money than most other companies, never mind development companies. If a large part of that profit is due to the CEOs strategies and effort then they get adequately rewarded, welcome to capitalism. Complaining that successful people earn a lot of money just comes off as jealousy really. You should also keep in mind that the Activision CEO runs a charity to help army vets in the US and other countries, Bill Gates has given untold millions to charity. And Steve Jobs....well, he was just a horrible person

[Irritablesquid]

Game publishers make enough money as is, they don't need to add micro transactions, advertisements when the top level management are taking home tens of millions every year.

The CEO of Activision apparently earned $38 million in 2018, clearly there is a huge amount of money in video games.