EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during ‘Replay’ moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in reviews. It wasn’t long before the backlash led to EA disabling the ads.
EA already did this. Many games had real ads on billboards in the world. Need for speed underground 2 was sponsored by cingular wireless. Your ingame pager was product placement and the company’s logo was on screen whenever you were doing free roam.
This is very EA with historical precident.
Tbh, having advertisment on billboards in a racing game is the less intrusive and immersive way to do in game advertisement.
But then again billboards in real life are an eye sore. /shrug
I hope gamers will unite. Though it seems far more likely that kids will just buy it because “wooooo hype. Who cares about ads, I already watch a bazillion a day when doomscrolling Instagram”.
I hope gamers will unite. Though it seems far more likely that kids will just buy it because “wooooo hype. Who cares about ads, I already watch a bazillion a day when doomscrolling Instagram”.
Something tells me they will, at least it’s on the latest generation to step up.
Previous generations of always pushed back against this, and won.
Pretty sure the Hell Divers 2 backlash was the only time I’ve ever seen gamers win over a corporation. Blizzard fans have made me absolutely cynical about gamer boycotts.
Pretty sure the Hell Divers 2 backlash was the only time I’ve ever seen gamers win over a corporation.
There’s been others, over the decades. This isn’t the first time they tried putting ads into games. All the other times were pushed back successfully.
Blizzard fans have made me absolutely cynical about gamer boycotts.
True-ish, but people really did step up more in more recent days, and voted with their wallets. The pop dropped was bad enough and for long enough that the company got sold off to Microsoft to recover, and Bobby is gone.
Nothing changed with Helldivers. The game is still blocked in over 100 countries and people who rightfully purchased the game still can not play it. Sure we don’t have to create an account, but that was annoying -not an actual issue. The real issue was thousands of people suddenly losing access to their game because Sony wants conversion.
Sony made a social media post. They didn’t fix shit. But now the backlash is gone and the countries are still blocked, they can silently reinstate the bullshit in 3 months time.
Regardless, I was expecting absolutely no change from Sony and quite frankly, still expect to do to a rug pull once people’s attention are elsewhere. Oh look, Microsoft is doing a thing now.
still expect to do to a rug pull once people’s attention are elsewhere. Oh look, Microsoft is doing a thing now.
Corporations being corporations and trying to rip off the customer to make the stockholder happy is a constant thing (unfortunately). “Viva Capitalism!”, and all that.
But ‘We the
PeopleCustomers’ ultimately have the control, we control the purse strings. They need the money in our wallets, and we can decide to give them that money or not, based on how they treat us, as customers. They will try to psyop convince you otherwise of that fact, but that fact remains, and holds true.Its an endless battle/war, but its a good one to fight for. Then they try something the next time, we push back against it. Again.
Nothing changed with Helldivers. The game is still blocked in over 100 countries and people who rightfully purchased the game still can not play it. Sure we don’t have to create an account, but that was annoying -not an actual issue. The real issue was thousands of people suddenly losing access to their game because Sony wants conversion.
Last I heard that problem went away with them backing off of not needing a Playstation account anymore.
And the fact that they backed off the account requirement is a definate win for us.
Sony made a social media post. Original date for PsN requirement was June. During the backlash, over 100 countries were delisted. They still are. The current situation is still much worse than launch.
Sony made a social media post. Original date for PsN requirement was June. During the backlash, over 100 countries were delisted. They still are. The current situation is still much worse than launch.
Don’t think you’re representing the situation accurately.
The primary goal was to not have to create a Playstation account, and people can get a refund now from Steam if they want, where before they could not.
Sony can always decide where to sell their products, regardless if there’s a controversy, or just any day of the week and for any reason. We could never control where Sony sells their products.
I’d love to know how to get a refund. I’ve tried 4 times with different prompts suggested in forums and comments. It is in fact worse and not equal to the state it was in at launch.
It’s pretty typical that you’re getting downvoted for not crying 100% gloom about every possible thing.
Yes, and consider what insane amount of pressure was necessary to achive this. Over 200.000 negative reviews for HD2. That makes it very unlikely to happen again. It shows how little gamers can achieve and how little their concerns are heard if they are not accumulating to a critical mass.
Get off the gaming market EA.
I can’t believe I’m actually going to have to become a retro gamer. Sigh.
Or you know, indie.
The real answer here. Indie scene is BOOMING
Once you discover the sea of great indie games you won’t even care what AAA is doing anymore. Some of the AAA games remove cash shops after the game loses relevance anyway, like Shadow of War, meaning you get rewarded for not buying the game until it is 90% off.
gamers, unite!
I cannot buy fewer EA games. The last EA game I bought ran on the Super Nintendo.
I cannot buy fewer EA games.
Not with that attitude
The last EA game I bought ran on the Super Nintendo.
Have you checked Babbage’s return policy?
Babbage as in the steam-driven mechanical game engine, version 2?
I remember the controllers being kinda clunky.
Heh
For reference for anyone
Now GameStop
*Babbage’s’s
Babbages’
*Babbages’s’
*Bbabbbagesssss
*FuncoLand
Once these companies have your money, they don’t care what you want. Don’t give your money to companies that abuse you like this.
This is another reason I tapping out of gamepass now. With whats happening with streaming, I don’t even want to support a “good deal” when I know the prices will go up, they’ll make tier pricing and add ads somewhere. I want to own my shit. I’m done with ads. Amazon last change to prime made me cancel all services except youtube and bought a 14tb hdd. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard are all on do not buy list for me.
Fuck EA of course but that AI pic is horrible. The fuck does a U-shaped Ferrari sitting in front of an Obama campaign billboard have to do with EA putting ads in games?
Spot the part in the article how they want to do it “again”? Now think what that implies.
Hint: Burnout Paradise, a racing game published by EA, was released in 2008.
Good thing seeing that a game is published or developed by EA, or one of its subsidiaries, is 9 times out of 10 enough for me to not bother with the game to begin with. They don’t make a thing that is worth dealing with them to get to play.
That company burned all of its good will and trust with me years ago. So sure go ahead and put as many ads as you want EA. I know for sure I won’t be seeing them.
I know that I’ve played EA games before, but I don’t think that I’ve played stuff from them recently, so I don’t have a personal preference on their games.
As long as they also provide some option to pay more and not have ads, I don’t really see an issue. It just becomes another option to buy the game – if you want ad-supported, can do that, and if you want to pay directly, you can do that.
If they don’t have any option to pay for an ad-free experience, then it seems like it could be obnoxious for people depending upon their ad preference.
I think that all the games that I would play – setting aside the issue of EA specifically – I’d rather pay for an ad-free experience, but eh. Games with ads – as well as the option to buy an ad-supported or ad-free version at different prices – are a major thing on, say, mobile, so obviously there are people who would prefer the ad-supported route.
Back in 2022, EA patented a system that generates in-game content and ads based on a person’s playstyle.
Personally, I don’t really think that I want to have my activity logged and data-mined either way, though. I would pretty much always rather pay more than have my activity recorded. I care more about that than the ads. I’m fine paying more for that, but I want the opt-out. I’d also really prefer that vendors like Steam make it very clear that if a game is being subsidized by extracting data on a user, what data is being extracted. Right now, it’s kind of a free-for-all, and the games aren’t running in a jail, so they can do pretty much whatever. I think that just making assumptions about what they do isn’t a great idea.
I remember when I saw a comment from some guy in an airport whose phone first set off an alarm and then told him that his gate had been changed and started giving him arrows to the new gate. He hadn’t told Google that he was flying anywhere. This was also back when Location Services was pretty new, so people were less-familiar with it. What had happened was that (1) Google had his location, (2) while he was indoors, while GPS didn’t work well Google had identified the location of other fixed devices with Bluetooth and WiFi radios emitting unique identifiers based on other people’s phones reporting them and building a global database, (3) Google could infer his position from getting their signal strengths, (4) Google had been scanning his email, seen the email that the airline had sent him about a gate change, scraped the email, and determined that he’d had a gate change.
That could be a useful feature, but the point is that he had no idea that any of that was happening or that Google was making use of the data at the time. And that was many years back – I guarantee that data-mining has gotten no less-intensive.
I remember talking to one friend who was a software engineer in the video game industry who was involved with some game where – after recording your gameplay for a while – they could, with pretty good accuracy, based on correlation with past users, infer with reasonable accuracy data that included one’s IQ and a set of “employability” statistics. That’s probably got value to an employer, but I suspect that most people aren’t thinking that they’re in a job interview determining their future employment status when they’re playing a video game in their living room. Like, if you’re working out what a video game costs, you probably aren’t thinking about the potential for it to creates information asymmetries in future job situations, where a potential employer has more data about you than you do about them.
I was going to read all of this until I got to “provide some option to pay more and not have ads” . Zero chance this would ever end in a consumer friendly way after that first payment.
Counter point, if I paid $60 for a game, i don’t want ads in that game
Counter-counter-point, “Devil’s 🥑,” games have cost $60 ($70 with the most recent generation) since, what, 2006? 2007?
$60 in 2006 is over $90 today.
So we’re paying less upfront for games now than we were in 2006. Yet costs to develop AAA games have gone up significantly.
I’m not saying ads in games is a good idea, I fucking hate ads. I also hate microtransactions. But every time prices go up people get angry. Remember the backlash when Xbox Series X and PS5 prices were standardized at $70?
I don’t know the solution. But the current trends are unsustainable. Just like everything else in late-stage capitalism.
It’s not our responsibility to help their shareholders make money.
We are purchasing a product from them, or a service, and we expect it to work, and not market us when we are using it.
If the cost of manufacturer is not being covered in the sales price to the customer, then they need the raise prices, or go out of business.
Or tell their shareholders to go pound sand.
This is an argument publishers love to make, but it’s bullshit. Yes, games (assuming you ignore in game purchases/DLC, which you obviously shouldn’t but I digress) have got cheaper in real terms due to inflation lowering how much $60 is really worth, while games have stayed at that price tag.
It’s also true that development costs have went up.
Now, here’s the part that game publishers conveniently never talk about: distributing games is far cheaper now. We’re usually not shipping pallets of discs that take up loads of space and cost money to physically create, while also having to build in a profit margin for all the middlemen along the way, including for the retailer. We predominantly buy games digitally.
On top of that, gaming used to be niche, now everybody does it. The market is far larger, so they don’t need to charge a lot to still make bank.
Now, here’s the part that game publishers conveniently never talk about: distributing games is far cheaper now. We’re usually not shipping pallets of discs that take up loads of space and cost money to physically create, while also having to build in a profit margin for all the middlemen along the way, including for the retailer. We predominantly buy games digitally.
On top of that, gaming used to be niche, now everybody does it. The market is far larger, so they don’t need to charge a lot to still make bank.
Great points! And yes, they’re almost never talked about!
A business model wherein the thing someone makes and sells brings in a profit just by customers buying the thing, without the long tail of continuing to sell the customers’ eyeballs to whoever forever after, is not an unreasonable concept. Countless indie games and smaller publishers have managed this for generations and still do.
If EA and the other massive blockbuster publishers can’t figure out how to make their business model work in a non-exploitative manner, too damn bad about it. We don’t actually need them.
If I paid >$0 for a game I don’t want ads in that game.
Season passes, in game stores, and every other mtx in a game I paid for is insulting and generally ends up being intrusive and annoying since they tend to shove it in your face.
Why would you pay full-price for the game then? Sales are constant, games do not hold their value. If you are a developer that is bothered by this, I suggest you stop working for EA
They tried it way before 2020 too, they talked to the agency I worked for at the time. Same result
They tried it way before 2020 too, they talked to the agency I worked for at the time. Same result
They tried it before 2020 as well.
They keep trying this every generation, hoping the latest generation will be dumb enough to accept it.
I remember them putting ads on the billboards in Battlefield 2142 way back when.
I 'member
A little thing called the “Massive Ad client” exists in NFS Carbon, Pro Street, Undercover and even World.
It was used to download ads off the internet and display them in the game’s own billboards.
It was also an entrypoint for a NFS World hack too lol so ripbozo EA
Good, do it.
Let your player base dwindle some more. I already outright refuse to play EA crap. Fill it with ads, make ads mandatory before and after all loading screen.
Want to equip new gear? Forced ads Want to save? Forced ads
Put so many ads that you make bajillions. Do it ea I dare you.
I hope they do it, shorting their stock will be easy af.
Here’s another great idea: persistent ads. Have ads take up a portion of the screen always. Players may want to shop while fighting a boss or taking a shot on goal.
Different portions of the screen
Otherwise it’s too vulnerable to a common blocking technology
Get fucked EA
Double fucked
Triple fucked
Running fuck riot!
I too choose for this company to get fucked.
I hear Ubisoft is now offering quad A fucks
They can fuck off too
why the fuck should I pay for them then?
…82% of the visual field… …before inducing seizures.
LOL “clever response involving a bottle of rum and the high seas”
