In the same way that slot machines and roulette wheels aren’t sustainable, sure. Once you figure out they’re a scam, you stop playing them.
But you don’t need to trick all the people all the time. You just need to trick enough people to turn a steady profit. Firms like Microsoft and EA have figured out a formula that’s worked for a long time and now they’re just running the playbook. Like any good bookie in Vegas, they make money off the suckers. And they reinvest a sizeable chunk of their profits into marketing to bring in new marks. And there’s always new marks.
No-one will enjoy where that leads
There will be a dozen senior executives in a VIP lounge absolutely enjoying where this goes in another five or ten years.
Sure. But a lot of the marketing is geared towards younger people unfamiliar with the service. I remember getting deluged with ads my freshman year of high school and again my freshman year of college, for instance.
They’re banking on their unsubscribe process being so obnoxious that they’ll lose fewer people than they gain, year to year. And given the steady growth of revenues for these programs, it appears to work over the long term.
Yeah, you’re pissing people off. But when everyone operates this way, it just becomes the standard for accessing this form of entertainment. Like ad reels before a movie starts. “Well, I just won’t go to the movies!” is a hollow protest in the midst of the crowds of people fighting to get into the theater.
Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work
They’re banking on people too young/old to know how to navigate past the screen to accidentally sign up for shit.
My one-year-old son accidentally got ahold of my TV remote and signed me back up for Netflix by pushing random buttons a month ago. Had to go through the TV and scour it of all the little pre-installed buy-me apps to make sure that couldn’t happen as easily again. Still not quite sure how to disable the “Netflix” button that’s built into the remote, shy of carving it out with a knife.
I’m personally a big fan of doing the very tiny semi-transparent (X) that’s impossible to click on as far away from the “Yes, Please Digitally Fuck My Wallet Pussy” blinking blue bar at bottom center of the screen.
Soulless cash grab with a healthy veneer of jingoism and plenty of toxic masculinity.
You’ll play your Muscle Man Beats Up The Evil Foreigners game, you’ll pay top dollar for it, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a loot box with a Trump/MBS NFT in it.
Was going to say… Who is out there buying games way outside their machines’ specs? Seems pretty straightforward.
I do get a little annoyed at the folks angry at BL4 using a higher end engine. Like, it does look a lot better than previous iterations. That engine upgrade wasn’t for nothing.
There are a ton of looter shooters floating around that aren’t using the Unreal 5 engine. Just play one of those instead.
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.
Wasn’t the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
Didn’t we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative “We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!” campaign?
It seems as though censorship of <insert bad thing> is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.
Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
That’s one theory.
Another is that we’re trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.
I’m sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we’ve been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is “how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth”? You don’t really need end-users if all you’re making is an AI-driven marketplace.
It’s why I’m excited for a certain JRPG remake that puts one such relation (between a guy and a girl) front and center, so much so that it becomes a driving element of the story.
Are we talking about FF7 or something else?
IMO, a good romantic plot sneaks up on you after you’ve invested in the characters.