2025: Let's try again

General Chat
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If we are talking about actual sports, the ads exist in the half-time or time-outs or whatever downtime there is depending on the sport for resting or coaching. Most people just change channel at that time or take a break from the screen themselves (to prep some food or gather the plates or whatever else). I used to watch a lot of football when I was younger, yet, somehow I have never watched a single half-time ad.

Sports video games have no downtime, because there are no real people that need rest or coaching, so as far as I know there are no ads in them either (however there are banners in the simulated stadiums, since those have ads on the side of the playing surfaces).

Be that as it may, the concept of interrupting a sports video game with an advertisement is counter-productive for at least three reasons:

a) I bought the game to play it, not watch ads. Advertisements in something that I’ve paid for is a kind of blasphemy that is more likely to infuriate the average player, than make them listen.
b) Video games provide fun and escapism. Both things that ads usually lack. You cannot suspend the disbelief of the player to talk to them about “the important message that candidate X has to tell you for the future of this country”. :sweat_smile: … I’d be willing to bet that a lot of sports video game players would actually vote against any politician that dared do this and invade our gaming downtime. As a former avid PES player myself, if you interrupt my flow to show me ads, I am boycotting whatever you are selling or voting against it, immediately, no questions asked.
c) Supposing that the ads come post-game, even people that would be in favour of the ad’s content, would probably skip it. If you are winning, then you want to get to the next game now that you are on a roll. If you are losing, then you want to get back to the drawing board and get to the next match to get back on your feet. Ain’t nobody got time for ads! We have a game to win. :wink:

Overall if you try to brainstorm what people would like to see and hear from you and you come up with “hey, why not ads in video games?”, then you shouldn’t be anywhere near a public office. At least not sitting behind that office, that is.

I only play one mobile game, but I’ve tried a few to pass the time on some bus trips etc.
The ads there are usually tied to intrinsic rewards (watch the ad to open a “free loot chest” or “watch the ad to double the rewards”), which is fine because mobile games are “free to play” and they have totally different monetization scheme. “I didn’t pay for it, so yeah, I’ll watch an ad so the devs get money” is something that most people will agree is reasonable.

Even so, most people just click the ads and then space out and not watch it. 30 seconds pass, you click the “skip and get the reward” and that’s it. Not a real place for a political message.

Indeed. Tolerable is the perfect word for them. Which, again, makes it a bad place to put a political message.

I didn’t bold it in my initial statement, but it was “Who wants an ad in a video game?”
So, yeah, maybe they exist in places like mobile free games, but no fan or player in the history of any video games has ever paused their game and said “oh, damn, this thing could use some ads. What a shame”.
Who wants ads in a video game? Noone does.
They are “tolerable” in some cases, yes, but “wanted”, they are not.

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Who wants ads anywhere though? :smiley:

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Also noone, I’d guess. Which makes the original idea even worse.

If it were TV ads, or video ads on the internet, I wouldn’t have commented on it. Those are places where ads are not only normalised, but part of successful marketing campaigns that have spanned decades and cost billions. That is a mainstream idea and no argument with that.

But adding ads to video games and starting the trend with political ads that you’d like the players to watch? wow. :sweat_smile:

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Even so, most people just click the ads and then space out and not watch it. 30 seconds pass, you click the “skip and get the reward” and that’s it.

Clearly, enough people pay attention that companies thing it’s worth it to purchase ad space.

Who wants ads in a video game? Noone does.

Two things can be true at once:

  • Nobody wants ads*
    • This isn’t totally true, but we don’t have to get into that for now
  • Ads work
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I’ve never seen a company/product being advertised on a mobile game. I always get ads for other - similar - mobile games.

There is a fantastic array of ads on mobile apps/websites, but not on mobile games.
Ads in mobile games, in their overwhelming majority advertise other mobile games. It is a very “closely knit” market. You can look this up. :slight_smile:

Now, altering that tactic to advertise some politician and their message will not damage the mobile games themselves (they will take your money, no problem) because the players understand that the ads do not come from the game devs. But they would damage the campaign of whoever employs those ads. The negative publicity and outcry alone would be quite the pop-corn show.

In general, yes, as I said in the previous post.
In this case, hey, I’d like them to try it. I am in it for the fun of it. And that’s going to be a lot of fun to watch.

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In fact so many people dislike ads, we have many adblockers available to make sure you can avoid as many ads as possible.

Even more, you can pay to remove and not see any ads and that’s a solid business model.

Ads are so annoying, you pay to get rid of them, in videos, streams, podcasts, games, news websites …

To be honest, I would wager a decent percentage of ads on games, youtube videos, even google ads, these days are scams, and so it is actually worth their time to advertise, since you’re not going to trick everyone but you might trick a few people.

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Sports video games often depict sponsorship logos on uniforms and race cars, when representing a real world team

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Ads. There is some tolerance around it sadly. Myself, I would enjoy a world ad free. The one I find most disturbing are coming from phone calls, but it seems that finally a law will come here (Fr) in 2026 to get them only if you consent.

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They have to do that contractually, unless they are making a pixel, top-down game like Sensible Soccer or Kick-off. When you make the bid to get the rights to use the names of the clubs, the names of the players and the attire of those teams, you have to represent the advertisements on the attires as well.

This is why EA’s FIFA accurately had to represent those sponsors on the uniforms.
However Konami’s ISS/PRO football games didn’t have those rights, so they didn’t do that. E.g. Instead of Liverpool FC, they had to rename it to “Merceyside Red”, just use some generic red uniform for them and create a new/fake badge for “Merceyside Red”, so it goes without saying that if they have no right to use the team’s name, their stadium, their colors and their uniform, they also skipped their advertisers.

Here is the Liverpool vs Everton local derby, in PES 05 and as you can see there are no sponsors, because they had no rights:

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When 10+ years later Konami paid to get the rights to the teams, they added the correct logos and the correct jerseys.

So, it is not like the sports games took any money for that kind of sponsorship. On the contrary, in that particular case, it is more likely that they actually had to pay for it to get the rights to the real teams. :wink:

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The fact that ads in video games are so benign and limited has nothing to do with players’ choices. It’s thanks to Valve, who have policies against many types of ads in games on Steam. At least according to this video:

It paints a bit of gloomy picture of the games industry in its current state, but since I don’t follow/play current games, I don’t know how serious it is. :sweat_smile:

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Probably a big problem of the industry is just generally the revenue model.

It’s not about making a game that’s good enough to be rebought for generations, it’s about making a game that you can milk as much money out of as efficiently as possible until moving onto the next game, or game in the series.

Football and wrestling games are a decent example of that kind of laziness. The new games are more or less minor updates on the old ones and the prices go up 10 euro as the year counter on the game increments by 1.

Then there’s subcription models to play online, where games would make you buy season passes and other things just to play the game online.

Or much much worse was having lootboxes, so rather than unlocking rewards you just gamble, and then you can spend real money to continue to gamble.

Even more efficient is to launch your game before it’s finished and then have many large updates to fix the game after its launch.

I think over the last decade, my brain is more attracted to indie games, pixel art, and other games that aren’t run by massive publishers like big AAA games. I probably won’t ever play Red Dead Redemption 2 because it’s a minimum of 150GB. Not to mention triple A games costing upwards of 80€ a game, and then they’ll still tack on a load of paid for DLC immediately after launch, or other subscriptions.

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It depends on the era we are talking.
Ads in video games were non-existent before mobile games and it is where they are mostly confined even today. There used to be an intrinsic understanding that once you pay for a product or movie or whatever else, then watching that movie or playing that game was obviously ad free, since you owned the copy of the game (and the same thing applied with music and CDs, for example - you could have ads in a radio station, but noone would dare includes ads in a CD album that you bought).

The situation got a bit more complex when smart-phones came along and then with streaming sites and virtual ownership and company launchers, subscription models, game-passes and all those modern schemes that were supposedly for the good of the products and the improvement of the industry and the reduction of the prices.

None of those three benefits materialised and now “the good/easy times” are slowly getting much harder and the pendulum is swinging back.

Ubisoft is even trying to prove in court that players do not even own the games they bought:

But as I said, times are getting harder and thus the wallets of the “normies” are getting drier… The aforementioned Ubisoft itself is failing (after overspending hundreds of millions of euros to create mediocre games) and is soon to be bought off by Tencent and probably split in half and thousands of people will lose their jobs. Other big studios are having mass layoffs already and, amidst all that, smaller companies/studios with more reasonable budgets but with clearer and newer ideas seem to be doing much better than the industry behemoths.

It is very serious.
Apple and google recently even lost a billion-dollars worth of court trial:

All in all it is a very interesting scene to keep an eye on. It is a sort of a “canary in the coalmine” for many monetization practices, industry ideas/trends and, of course, cultural behaviours. And on that “cultural behaviour” condition stands my estimation that a politician that would dare buy ads in video games at this moment in time in order to approach the “young men” demographic would:
a) probably lose votes instead of gain any.
b) practically prove that they are so detached from reality that they shouldn’t hold any public office.

P.S.
In the case of the video, I’ve found that this particular channel is a bit on the “bloat side”… the useful content can be 3 minutes and he tends to talk talk and talk some more to get the video to a much more “ad algorithm friendly” size, which is always a bit ironic. :sweat_smile:

Usually I see the titles and if I am interested in the topic I go and locate articles about it. Saves me some time and I get more actual information that way, without having to hear the opinion of the content creator.

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It is quite a painful aspect of modern YouTube. A video comments on a topic with like you say maybe : minutes of real commentary and intro etc, but stretches it out into 10 mins because the algorithm works better or the ad revenue is better etc.

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It would have been nice if they were “updates”… at some point they just changed 2018 to 2019 and they forgot to update the banners in the stadiums :stuck_out_tongue:

What is worse, they actually downgrade the things in the game. I quit my beloved PES series around 2008, when they actually removed features twice in a row from one year to the next and the game became worse than before.

Sorry, but no. I loved those games for years, but I had to let them go. Permanently.

Unfortunately though, there were a lot of people with disposable incomes and not an ounce of consumer sense. The kind of people that keep buying iphone after iphone each year, insist in re-buying game series like FIFA or PES or whatever else and keep feeding those companies with endless cash by accepting subscription models and microtransactions on games they actually bought (the FIFA series alone raked in billions for EA).

Seems that slowly that money is getting reduced due to the economic conditions. Not by a lot, of course, but in the current era of greed, for a company to just have slightly reducted profits can be a “calamity” on the quarterly update of the shareholders and if you keep doing that, then the stock price might do an Ubisoft:

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With few exceptions, like Baldur’s Gate 3, most big hype games are not really worth their money.

As far as I am concerned it helps that I am older and I actually like the indie/pixel aesthetic anyway, since I grew up with it. “Drova, foresaken kin” for a recent example was excellent both in gameplay and scenario, “Streets of rogue” was a blast when I played it a few years ago and I’ve actually been playing “Starsector” recently, which is so indie that it is not even on Steam :sweat_smile: … You buy the game key from their website and it is DRM-free, for ever. No questions asked. Best 15 euros I’ve ever spend on a game, for sure.

My next goal is to eventually try this and this:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/ftl-multiverse

Both are said to be amazing overhauls of FTL (a 2012 pixel graphics game which is still cheap and never milked its audience) and a Dungeon Keeper (a game that came out in 1997 and I played as a kid and I still consider it grand fun).

Why would I ever pay 70+ euros for “triple A” slopware when I have a huge backlog of older amazing games? :sweat_smile:

I always wait for the reviews and the discounts.
If it has persistent bugs, “immediate DLCs”, battlepasses, microtransactions, denuvo “anticheat spyware” then I just do not buy it.

Yeah, most content creators forget that we can read faster that they can talk. :wink:

Again though, they live off the lazy average. Most people will just sit there and listened to them reading an article and regurgitating the points on the screen to fill up the time, instead of stopping the video, googling the article’s title and reading and forming their opinion themselves.

It is what it is. At least a few of them try to keep it somewhat brief or somewhat funny or interesting.

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From the familiar orange Tide logo on racecars to the Diesel-clothed skateboarder, brands are cropping up in virtual environments as a way for game developers to enhance realism and circumvent the rising cost of game development (GA Source Business News, 1999). Half of the top 25 videogames feature a licensed player or branded product (gamesweek.com, December 2000)

Nelson, M. R. (2002). Recall of brand placements in computer/video games. Journal of advertising research, 42(2), 80-91.

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We are quite a few posts in this issue and it was generated by the mention of politicians potentially buying actual advertising TIME within video games.

Can we please understand the difference between an actual advertisement that runs on your screen and interrupts your game/movie/series/whatever, with a corporate/product banner on the side/bottom and with “brand placements” of a logo or a product that exists in a game?

Those are three different things, with different levels of obstruction and thus, unsurprisingly, people have different reactions and opinions on them.

I happened to have owned the old Nascar racing game (that was made in 1994 a friend gave it away to me because it was, well, a bit bad, so he had gotten if almost for free around 1996) and the cover of the game looked like this:

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While in game it looked like this:

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Well, big surprise, race cars having sponsors and banners/logos and brand placements on the hoods. The real cars had them, ergo the game had to have them too, just like I explained earlier with the football team jerseys.

All this though does not matter either way because those are not the kinds ads that the original article was talking about and, therefore, those are not the ads I am talking about either.

Nobody is going to strap Bernie Sanders’ face on Nascar vehicle, a football jersey or a detergent box or a soda can and call that “political advertising” and if they do, then, by God, I’d like to see it happen. :rofl:

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I think this one was pretty bad though

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yihk, that’s disgusting… and that product placement was nasty as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

This reminds me of a persistent question that I’ve had in the last few years that I keep finding empty energy drink cans at the middle-school/high-school grounds that I go to play basketball in the afternoons:
Why on earth do teenagers drink that stuff? Since when do young people feel like they “lack energy” and need to drink this disgusting concoction?

And how come energy drinks are the only types of cans that I keep finding on the ground?
Do only utter pillocks that lack manners drink that stuff or they usually have proper manners when consuming other products but drinking that stuff makes them forget that there are garbage bins nearby? :thinking:

That should have probably gone in the questions that do not deserve their own threads to be honest…

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I’ve read the article and the one it was referencing and neither mentions which form of advertisements in video games the Democrats are thinking about. Why are you assuming it is some form that doesn’t work, because it would be too annoying?

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