EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again
techspot.com
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.
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
An EA exec got hard reading that
Get fucked EA
Double fucked
Triple fucked
I hear Ubisoft is now offering quad A fucks
They can fuck off too
I too choose for this company to get fucked.
Running fuck riot!
I cannot buy fewer EA games. The last EA game I bought ran on the Super Nintendo.
Not with that attitude
Have you checked Babbage’s return policy?
*Babbage’s’s
Babbages'
*Babbages's'
*Bbabbbagesssss
*FuncoLand
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
Oh, it won't be exclusive EA-exclusive enshittification, I'm sure.
I haven't bought any EA games in many years as well. I don't have any EA games in my Steam library, though I probably have some Xbox 360 games around. The only one I know for sure was Rogue Squadron II on Gamecube
Wait, Rogue Leader was Lucasarts and Factor 5. EA didn't have anything to do with it, did they?
Maybe not, I don't know if EA was handling Star Wars yet.
I used to buy FIFA and NHL games, once every few years. But they've gotten so shitty I just gave up on them. I haven't played a soccer game in years now. PES used to be a good alternative but I've heard it's not great anymore either.
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".
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!
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.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
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.
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.
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.
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.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Was it or was it just poorly implemented and the metrics were looking good for the companies buying the ads? Not sure Microsoft firing Bobby because he was a bad leader or just cause it's an easy way to trim fat and make the purchase look better for their investors.
I'm really struggling to remember when 's the last time I played an EA game. I can't really...
Let them monetize everything until oblivion,no one's gonna stop them anyway,so they might as well slowly die.
They've got EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA) and madden though, they're never going to die.
Maybe not, but individuals can choose where to spend their money. The masses will still buy this shit, but I am the kinda guy will will make his own life harder based on morals.
Like I ain’t shopped on Amazon for years. Some stuff I just can’t find anymore. Not used WhatsApp for many years, makes it harder to join friend group chats. Etc.
The dark side of the XKCD comic Ten Thousand is that there's always a new pool of suckers entering the market - people who haven't gotten burned yet and think they're getting something real.
I wouldn't even call it morals so much at Once Bitten, Twice Shy. There's a point at which you don't want to keep doing business with people who make you miserable.
Yeah I agree completely, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that companies are going to go bankrupt because a minority of users are absolutist about in-game ads, or will sacrifice social connections to avoid using Meta products.
In these cases an individual can act for any number of valid reasons, but it takes a much bigger collective action to influence the outcome, which requires a much bigger reason/scandal.
This is my argument.
I don’t believe my choices have an impact at all, in fact they impact me more negatively than the things I avoid.
But I can sleep at night knowing I am not giving them my money, or my business, etc.
It’s like with the Reddit exodus and people thinking it would / will be the death of Reddit. The truth is they barley noticed we left and they certainly don’t care, but again morals.
You never know, this thread could make more people think like this and make conscious choices where you can, for yourself so you know you tried to not be a part of the problem.
They tried it way before 2020 too, they talked to the agency I worked for at the time. Same result
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
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
They tried it before 2020 as well.
They keep trying this every generation, hoping the latest generation will be dumb enough to accept it.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
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
City of Heroes tried the same basic thing back in the day. They figured it's an urban environment that has billboards and posters as part of the general clutter, why not get paid to switch out a fake ad for a real ad?
Burnout paradise city. Which also was one of my fav games of all time. No ads would be cool.
And they already do it on mobile. They are just trying to bring ads to the pc and consoles, just like they do on mobile.
If they'd just be smart about it. Make the ads in-game. Like a Nike poster on a wall or a can of Pepsi on a table or something. I wouldn't have a problem with that. Making them the entire focus - however brief - just makes me hate them immeasurably.
Even then they should still be held to a higher standard.
Especially now in the era of generative AI.
The poster should have a well known character in the world lore holding the Coke, or a location in the map for the car ad, etc.
The ads should feel like they are actually a part of the world, and shouldn't be put in a game unless this can be accomplished.
In game ads don't have to suck. But because the power dynamic is such that shit ads can be shoved down players' throats with the only response being to not buy that publisher's games, the medium isn't going to find an acceptable equilibrium.
In game ads in live service games for in game assets may not suck too much though (an inevitable part of the future).
I'm pretty sure their goal is to bring ads in the same form as the mobile games, not as part of the in-game world. If they can do it on mobile, why shouldn't they on pc or consoles?
I think this will be an important thing for gamers to unite against, because if there isn't enough push back, every big studio will do the same.
Good thing I haven't bought a game from a big name studio since, uhh, does Elden Ring count?
Soon the game world will have speakers with ads, that will not really follow volume settings or distance attenuation.
The tutorial will have you collect "refreshing Pepsi Colas".
Cinematics will always look to the big billboards.
And the game will have strict anti tampering/mods and will require internet connection to support this adds.
EA doesn't get the benefit of the doubt anymore
Yeah, I didn't say I trust them to do it right, just that it could be done tastefully.
You can’t really sell ads on a per impression basis with just product placement. They want the ad sales to be recurring revenue.
There are many independent developers who deserve your money more than EA. Vote with your wallet.
why the fuck should I pay for them then?
Fellow gamers, now is the time to push back on this crap. If you don't do it now, you'll live with this forever. They tried doing this in past generations as well, and failed.
Spread the word, tell others. Be vocal! Advocate for this not happening.
And if someone tells you that this isn't preventable, tell them not to be cynical. Remind them of the other positive changes we were able to have happen recently in gaming, and that in the past when they tried this, the pushback was successful in keeping the gaming companies from doing so.
And remember, some of those you would try to convince are probably astroturfers/bots.
(https://lemmy.world/comment/9975178) (https://lemmy.world/comment/9977246)
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
EA is on my boycott list since Origin & ME3. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
How many of those have in-game ads though?
There's a history of pushing back against adding ads into games, that's different than boycotting the company overall. One can be successful, when another is not.
And having said that, one could even argue that their desperation to make money by putting ads into games (again) is not just about keeping the shareholders happy, but also because of people having boycotted them over the years, depriving them of additional income. You may be making more of a stand than you realize.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
I'm saying there's not really anything more I can do when it comes to EA. The company is already completely down the shitter for me and they're the ones who would have to gain my trust back. That's the only possible development. The problem is that many people don't have a similar spine for actual principles like this, and the majority of people simply don't even care. That's why this rotten company is not just still a thing, but continues to do what they've done for the last couple decades.
You are already doing your part. Thank you, citizen.
But, you can also vocalize to others, especially the younger generation, that things like ads in games can be pushed back against successfully, as it has in the past. That they don't have to put up with crap, or think they can't push back against the monolithic corporation, because its been done before, successfully.
Hell, EA was one of those companies that tried ads in games before, and had to retreat from the pushback from customers.
I always thought that they cared, especially if they are being taken advantaged of, but that it doesn't rise to a high enough threshold to actually do something about it (they triage it lower on their problem list), and that they feel that they are alone in doing it, so why bother.
What past events have shown though is that if we all do it together, even in a non-coordinated sort of way (organically), then the burden is not that hard individually, and the effort/pushback works well/enough.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Remeber if they call you naive or quixotic or an idealist that means they can't win the argument with normal means and rely on name calling. Act with integrity, it's worth it!
The ones pushing back are either trolls or bootylickers; the recent Helldivers2 shitstorm proved that things can change.
And there's a history of successfully pushing back against this change as well!
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
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.
Dead Space from 2008 is such a good game. EA has fallen so far. I don't see myself ever buying another EA game at this point.
they don't make games. they're a publisher
*they're buying studios who make legendary games and kill them.
They are a parasite to the gaming landscape.
That role is more on Embracer now
And Microsoft, as of recently.
That's all they are now. RIP EA Redwood Shores. 🥲
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.
LOL "clever response involving a bottle of rum and the high seas"
...82% of the visual field... ...before inducing seizures.
Last EA game I bought was Battlefield 1 at launch, since I was a Battlefield fanatic. Haven't given them a penny since. I'm doing my part.
Hmm. I think the last one I bought was Red Alert 3. Still worth it imo.
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.
My last EA title was Red Alert III which they swaped for a version that required origin. I miss Westwood.
I do hope someone works out how to mod this to replace all ads with KPop.
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
i just want to fucking play battlefield 1 when i want that i own. i don't care about your EA live services, i don't care about your ads. i already gave you my money because i liked the game. but i fucking hate you so much EA, like you're on top of the list
Idiots.
Only game I play from EA is apex. Everything else is....rented...online....indefinitely. 🏴☠️
I'd be okay with this if they made those games cheaper. But no, I have to pay $94 CAD for a shit live service game that I don't even have the rights to and which the online service may be terminated at any time. Fuck EA and their monopoly on sports games.
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.
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.
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.
Counter point, if I paid $60 for a game, i don't want ads in that game
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.
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.
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 and transport, 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!
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
They also have far better scaling on sales than they did in 2006, with tons of storefronts and easy access for anyone to download and play a game without needing to go to a physical store.
People like to complain about steam taking 30% of a sale, but it isn't like game companies were getting 70% of a boxed game on a shelf. They had manufacturing, shipping, and a ton of other costs for physical media that they don't spend on digital sales that can scale infinitely in an extremely short period of time because it can't sell out locally.
If they are spending too much for their return, then they need to scale back their spending.
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.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Even though costs of AAA games have gone up for some games (certainly not all) because of the size of teams/labor hours, so have the volume of sales. Publishers have made more and more profit while the average price of AAA games had stayed about the same for a long time.
Games selling in the hundreds of thousands was considered really good decades ago but now those are in the tens of millions.
Publishers aren't having problems with profitability, so much so that they've been buying up large swaths of development houses and IPs and then dismantling them when they have a single flop.
EA's gross profit in 2010 was $1.6B, in 2014 was $3.03B and in the past 12 months have been $5.8B right now according to macrotrends.
The current trend in profitability is increasing, not decreasing. It isn't a minor trend or minor increases either.
Major publisher profitability has vastly increased in spite of stagnant game prices. They don't have to increase prices to increase growth. It is simply that the market allows the increase of the price with more profitability and so they do.
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.
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.
Same, if you've already paid a premium for a "AAA" game. Paying more to no have ads is insane. I'll just not play those games, thanks.