EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games — titles that players purchase up-front for around $70 apiece. In the Q&A part of EA’s latest earnings call, Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs asked Wilson about dynamic ad insertion in traditional AAA games. Wilson said, “…Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us.” He then continued, “…we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.”
Not at all. Voting means going to a voting booth or mailing your vote. What you are asking is that people go against their impulses and overpower tons of marketing efforts and in many cases dark patterns that keep people addicted.
Declaring them as equal shows lack of understanding of how advanced marketing is today. They literally employ psychologists to influence people.
We’re talking about an entertainment product here though, not who’s going to be the next president. Voting with your wallet always works for yourself in this case. Don’t buy the ad-infested game = you don’t get an ad-invested game. Simple as that.
Sure, if many people follow and nobody buys their ad-infested games, they’ll change it up. But even if they don’t, you still benefit by having “voted” yourself.
All those same marketing techniques are also employed with actual elections.
My point was that “voting with your wallet” works, it is not a flaw in the method, it is a flaw in the low number of people employing it that it achieves so little. It is inherently no worse than all the other things you could do that you can’t convince anyone else to join you in when protesting company’s behavior. In fact I would go so far as to say that convincing yourself that you did something and then still buying their product is actually just giving in to those very same dark patterns you mention.