Electronic Arts has launched EA Advertising, a way for brands to integrate ads in games
1d 21h ago by lemmy.world/u/Innerworld in games from www.eurogamer.net
EA you're already known as the worst, you don't need to prove the point any more...
Between them, Ubisoft, and Blizzard/Activision, it's been a frantic race to the bottom.
EA to my knowledge just has shitty business practices. Ubisoft at a minimum had a culture of sexual harrassers, possibly assaulters. Blizzard certainly had rapists. Ubisoft also with the pioneering always online DRM for single player games getting back to the games portion of their evils
Bethesda still manages to stay in the "honorable mention" category.
Obviously not bad enough because people continue buying them.
games like diablo4(expansions) is what keeps people coming back to blizzard.
Which is pitiful, because D4 is just a giant MTX interface with some shiny graphics.
UBISOFT is trying vie for that number 1 spot, they went so far as help produce a show on appletv+ to spread good propaganda bout itself.
Man, EA just fully doesn't give a shit about making games anymore, eh?
They care very much about making games that get bought.
Years ago there was an rpg based around skittles. Yes skittles. It was a banger, fun as hell. It also flopped because absolutely-fucking no one wants to play an advertisement.
Listen here EA - the world fucking sucks, no one is fucking happy. Can you just focus on making fun fucking things and not take a giant enshitification all over the one things most of us have to keep us from being on top of a water tower with a high powered rifle? Can we have ONE FUCKING THING??!
Weirdly enough, there’s been A FEW of these types of games that were based either on a specific product or a specific brand, and they were for the most part, weirdly well done for the times they released in and actually sorta fun.
Off the top of my head, Pepsiman for a specific product and the whole lot of Lego games if we’re talking about a whole product line.
I think that whole genre is called advergames
Chex Quest was legitimately good, but mostly because it was just a Doom mod
I think legos are in their own genre no matter what. That’s like advertising a game franchise.
Those Xbox burger king games were legitimately fun....
Sneak king!
That was one of them... Weren't there two others but I agree sneak King was the best.
Sneak King was fun but, sorry not sorry, Pocketbike Racer was the best. No clue what the third one was.
I am genuinely surprised none of the freaks around here have mentioned the KFC dating sim yet.
Candystand.com games went crazy back in the early 2000's
The Dungeons and Dragons idle game has a champion that is composed of Nerds candy pieces. It's actually a fun character concept because you can switch the nerds around to different colors, each one with a different class that changes how their mechanics work. But it's just so weird seeing candy you can eat alongside Drizzt Do'urden that I never use them.
Sometimes I forget that the LEGO games are just really fancy ads.
That Nerf clone of Unreal Tournament was dope
The old Kellogg's game from mid 90's was really clunky, but it was great fun as a <10 year old not knowing any better!
Hell, 7up had a platformer. Wasn't a bad game
That Xbox BK game, Domino’s Noid game, I think 7up had an othello clone.
*Pepsi Maaaaann!*
Those drink ad games were a fever dream.
The best game that was just an advertisement was Chex Quest. But, I mean, they hired some teenagers who loved Doom to make the game and gave them little to no oversight other than "explain what a healthy breakfast is and include Chex cereal." So they just made a kick-ass Doom clone that only marginally advertises the cereal.
The packaging for the game really tried to hide it was an advertisement game. Title is Darkened Skye which says nothing about it being a skittles game.
Apparently the singular of skittles is "Skittles" according to that game
Cool Spot was my jam but I still drank Sprite
Unfortunately, Andrew Wilson needs more money to purchase more kidnapped children from Asia.
Ventrue Princes gotta Ventrue Prince.
Oh no, don’t make me not buy your product even more. I’m already at 0.
Maybe we can pre-order and cancel...
I can't wait to shoot my way around war torn half destroyed cities with pristine advertising signs in the next Battlefield.
Looks like another punishment for buying their games legally. Cracked versions don’t connect to their servers so they wont load ads.
I foresee this getting their titles kicked off steam, since their developer TOS pretty much forbids this.
obligatory
If the game is not good on its own and requires ads to be profitable... Then it's not worth buying anyway
Thinking in terms of “need” is wrong for a business. They aren’t there to make a good product and the money is just to cover all the costs. Their goal is profit maximization. If there’s profit they could be extracting, but aren’t, they won’t make the numbers bigger and the shareholders will be sad.
Ads are a gas. They expand to fill all available space. If there’s a place an ad COULD go, then it WILL go there eventually.
They could offer it for free instead with that.
Free games with MTX and ads and shit are all the rage anyway
Im still baffled by all the money some games make off cosmetics.
Cosmetics in paid loot boxes are a serious issue, but if you can make money to help pay for your game with non paid lootbox cosmetics, all the more power to ya, but i don't understand it hah.
"I love it! That's what's been missing the whole time!" --EA Shareholders
Finally!
If there's one thing EA's gaming lacked, it was an opportunity to accidentally click on something that tried to charge my credit card.
reminder that saudi arabia's public fund has bought ea. they're trying to squeeze out all the revenue they can. tumble down the enshittification pyramid
That's true, although very simplified. The slightly less simplified version is that Jared Kushner's private equidy firm and the Saudis took a huge loan to buy EA then loaded the company with that debt. EA will be forced to sell a huge chunk of their portfolio and layoff thousands of people. If they survive this somehow they will be a shadow of what once was but more likely they'll simply vanish soon. This shit should be completely illegal but I would lie if I said I'll miss EA. A few people at the top getting filthy rich by destroying the company seems like a very fitting end for them.
It should be illegal to buy a company on loan and transfer that debt to the company. You should be required to get your money back via dividends or by building the company up and reselling it.
They won't be missed, destroyer of game franchises, studios and pioneer in anti-consumer stuff and transforming games into gambling, children welcome.
Kojima or whoever did it before him should've patented it so the disease doesn't spread.
Honestly, anyone buying EA games deserve it.
Running through a bombed out kitchen in a 'call of battle strike' game, hesitate when I see the oven is full of condoms and the cabinets full of luxury watches.
You now have 300 condoms in your inventory and an intriguing side mission with your fellow soldiers.
Fitgirlblockorigin
I remember when EA was the Goat back in the Commodore 64 days. How far they’ve fallen.
Greatest Offering Around Then?
Because "greatest of all time" implies it's also great now... which is a time.
We can't know what's going to be the greatest of all time in the future, only what's the greatest of all time so far.
Who’s got that award?
Very hot take but maybe Nintendo? I know, I know. They suck in some regards. But some of their games are still innovative.
Fun take but considering how they treat their fans I wouldn’t give them that award.
more slop than innovative, its just the numbnuts keep buying the current pokemon slop games is whats keep switch justified in thier sloppy gaming development.
A game developer with a consistently high hit rate in their output? Kojima, maybe? FromSoft? We've seen a lot of empires fall in recent years.
I'd add Don't Nod, at least from what I've seen.
Really? They've been mostly misses from what I can tell. They don't review very well or sell many copies for most of their games. Recent reporting indicates that Tencent no longer wants to finance them, and their future is shaky.
Seriously? I'm only about halfway through the Life is Strange series, but it's been fantastic so far and Lost Records just came out last year and looks amazing. To each his own, but I hope they are able to crowdfund or some other alternative if Tencent drops them.
Does our knowledge of a thing preclude it from being? Is reality subjective or objective? If Bill Smithers of 34 Poplar Way in Schenectady, NY (sorry, Bill) said Ms. Pac-Man was the GOAT of video games make it true because he said it before his passing in 2011 after playing a 49 hour raiding session in World of Warcraft?
It does not. "Greatest of all time back in the day" does not imply it's still the greatest. By your logic the future is also a time. As we don't know it yet, nothing can ever be the greatest of all time, making the term meaningless.
"All time."
So the term is meaningless for you? That's fine.
Again, if something was the greatest of all time, it does not mean it still has to be. Otherwise the term is meaningless as even greater things might come in the future.
Your definition in your own words defines it as meaningless.
If you only take it in the most literal sense, sure. A pointless exercise, don't you think? Sometimes words have a funny way of meaning more than one thing. For most this concept works and GOAT can be meaningful. No, I'm not talking about the animal. Just to be clear.
GOAT = Greatest of All Time, right?
Why not just say "great?"
Makes "of all time" meaningless if you overuse it.
Allow me to invoke Eddie Izzard... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rYT0YvQ3hs
Oh, I agree with you. It has been overused and I'm not a fan. Maybe the most overused acronym of all time?
I guess I was annoyed by you being pedantic resulting in me... being pedantic. Tragic, really.
Thanks for the sketch. I enjoyed it. It was awesome but more in the hot dog kind of way.
It's one of my favorite comedy specials. "Dress to Kill." Also, his special "Circles" was great.
It’s only meaningless if you’re pedantic.
It obviously means the greatest of all time so far because at the time you make the statement you cannot judge what hasn’t happened yet.
It gets more complicated when you’re saying it about a company or game in the past but I still think that it has meaning. It could mean that at the time, they were the greatest of all time (up until that point in time) but it could also mean that at this point in time that past version of EA was the greatest of all time (up until now, which is beyond the time that that version of EA existed).
turned around the time they bought westwood and killed off cnc franchise(technically) a decade later.
TV timeouts during the quarters of Madden games. They'll do a skippable halftime recap then 5 minutes of unskippable ads. Make it like a real NFL broadcast.
Whenever they do something like this it's just a nail in the coffin for me and I am that much less incentivized to ever buy their games
Didn't we stop allowing overt advertising in movies and music videos for a reason?
When did that happen?
I'm also wondering the same thing. There are tons of product placement in movies.
The easy ones to spot are the car ones, since they always seem to have the manufacturer logo visible.
Wayne's World even had a not-so-subtle clip about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs
Yeah there is and you're correct that I was mistaken to some extent but I'm not going to rehash it here. There's a longer comment explaining that I made to the original user who responded to me that you can read if you're interested but it's... A lot.
Thanks for the ping! Worth the read.
Advertisements have changed a lot in my lifetime and I don't keep good track of the why even though I recognize that there have been definite changes. Sorry for the confusion.
So we sort of did but not for the reasons you'd think. Not for the reasons I thought at least.
Specifically there used to be a time when there was ad placement in movies and tv literally all the time. But more often than not now a days this doesn't happen that way because companies that have trade marked logos or symbols don't want to allow their products to be used without getting paid a licensing fee and companies that would use this kind of product placement don't want to pay the licensing fee which is why in the late 80's and early 90's there was a rise in blurring logos and brand names in media. There's also the risk of certain licensing agreements not being legitimate for certain markets which can lead to blurring of the same type or it's newer counterpart which involves using stickers or off brand styling instead.
But also some other countries do ban it. China apparently instituted such a ban in 2011.
But anyway I got confused because around the same time there was a ban on certain products being allowed to advertise in movies and directly in tv shows (cigarettes/tabacco products, alcoholic beverage brands, guns etc). I was exhausted and wrong and that's on me.
"Fun" to see them go for it again. I remember they had ads in Battlefield 2 for Nvidia and Intel. I can't quite remember if they said they wanted the ads to be dynamic all the way back then as well or if the one-and-done billboard were intended.
Time is cyclical it seems. They did something just like this 20 years ago.
I remember when Quake Live introduced it, but it never really gained any traction.
A popular server-side mod for Counter-Strike (the 1.6 era) introduced in-map texture substitution for advertising as well... but I think it was pissed on by the community so much that it never saw widespread use.
Sounds like the time is right to try again.
Rs Vegas 2?
NFS Underground 2 had in-game advertising for Cingular and Burger King.
NFS Carbon was absolutely plastered with T-mobile advertising.
I was thinking the same - i hadn't realised that it ever went away (as I don't play the genres traditionally associated with in game ads).
I can't wait to see gamers at large fail to boycott this.
I think I haven't played a single EA title in a decade, will continue to do so.
I haven't purchased any ea games since 2013 and this reminds me why.
Who.... Buys.... EA games? I haven't given them a dime shit since they launched Origin.
"After removing Holiday's Ad Restrictions We estimate we can sell up to 80% of a user's vision without inducing seizures" - Nolan Sorrento
Time to buy Paralives!
Yeah fuck all that.
I don’t really mind if it doesn’t break the immersion or lower the quality of a game.
If it’s some unskipable add or some big billboards for Pepsi in a medieval game, I do mind.
I dunno how many games EA makes set in the past or secondary worlds, but gauranteed it will drop. We may still get scifi games chock full of today's brands.
I never play EA slop, so… anyways.
And they keep asking why many people resort to piracy. Nothing is owned these days; I feel like they also want me to pay for breathing next year.
.... god dam it
I'd be all for it if it meant the other shit would go away. I'd rather see Mountain Dew (instead of Altitude Precipitation or whatever) in the Sims if it meant no microtransactions and other annoying ads. But it's EA, that's not gonna happen, we'll just get Mountain Dew in the Sims AND ads AND microtransactions.
U.S. Patent 8246454B2 is a real thing.