Category Archives: Commentary
Switch to Switch 2
Longtime readers may recall that I was debating between the Switch vs Switch 2 last year, once Little Man came to a videogame awakening. I ended up purchasing a new Switch OLED bundle with Mario Kart 8 for $275 total last July. Plus, a kinda dumb amount of games… almost all of which got played! He’s not quite ready for Smash Bros yet. I am overall pleased with how that situation shook out.
Now, a year later and almost exactly to the day, I also bought (and since received) a Switch 2.
The Switch 2 bundle cost a total of $426.60, which is obviously much higher than the original Switch. Plus, you know, I still have the original Switch. What gives? Several kinda sorta related things.
- There is a pending $50 price hike for the console in September
- Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake releasing in 2026
- I already own Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom plus have Nintendo expansion pass subscription, meaning I could get upgraded graphics/fps for when we start playing that
- Super Mario Sunshine is coming to the GameCube emulator (requires expansion pass)
- Missed the most recent Costco eShop gift card sale, e.g. $500 credit for $400 spent
- Donkey Kong Bananza is closest to Mario Odyssey, so Little Man may enjoy that
- Switch 2 version of Minecraft releasing in October
That, no doubt, sounds like a lot of explanation concerning a topic that should warrant none.
“Who you trying to convince?” Yes, me, myself. I routinely agonize over $15 game purchases, and whether 67% off is worth it considering the all-time-low was 70% three months ago. I once bought a game from an overseas storefront and ended up getting my bank account frozen “out of caution,” all trying to save $3 versus just buying it on Steam. I was not in any way depending on that $3, it was just the principle of the thing. I mean, hell, it was a Steam code in the first place!
Whatever. It’s done. The Switch 2 is fully functional – the refurbishment tag apparently referred to the box having beat-up corners – and has replaced the original Switch in all ways. I could sell the original for… looks like $160 on eBay at the moment, but my assumption is that it will stick around. Partly as a backup device, partly as an inheritable device, and partly because my wife mentioned she may want to play stuff on it. Theoretically, I could do local co-op with some games, but I have not yet done the research for which games require two copies and which can be shared.
It is kind of funny/sad looking at the list of games in the Nintendo eShop and realizing how many I already own on Steam, often for much less. Although, now that I’m looking, maybe not. For example, We Love Katamari REROLL is like $7.50 on Switch and the IsThereAnyDeal lowest was $5.77 two years ago. Donut County is $3.24 versus $2.43. I even bought that last one in a bundle deal like two months ago. Huh. For some reason I thought that something like Hollow Knight: Silksong retailed for more on Switch, but apparently the MSRP is the same.
I still prefer gaming on the PC, and Steam allows for me leverage my Retroid Pocket 6 if I need to go mobile, but this is starting to make me think about some things. Not for now, but perhaps in the future.
Sign of the Times
A few weeks ago, the Ohio State Fair had a poster contest. Grand prize was $1,000. It was won by someone submitting the most banal, directly-copied AI slop imaginable:
You don’t need to take my word for it. The officials came out and posted the following:
When the poster contest was originally formed in 2024, the use of AI was permitted if explained as a part of the application process. However, we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI. We are committed to celebrating Ohio artists, with a number of other competitions that don’t permit AI, including the fine arts exhibition, creative arts competitions, mural contest, and plein air painting.
To be fair to the artist prompt engineer, there weren’t any rules against it. Which is honestly surprising, considering Colorado had this same exact issue back in 2022 during their State Fair art contest. Also, who in the Boomer fuck was judging this contest in the first place? You can use the original link to see 2nd-5th place, any of which I would argue are objectively better than what was selected.
Of course, I’m kind of assuming the others weren’t just AI themselves. Second place has me suspicious.
Anyway, add it to the pile.
What Would You Say You Do Around Here?
There is a sentiment that some “light” usages of AI are okay because it simply reduces the friction a bit on content creation. For example, Kelly writes:
But if AI can be helpful for things like blog production. I know, for example, that blog posts with an image are several times more likely to attract someone’s attention than one without an image. I lack time and artistic skill to create my own images, but I can craft a prompt and get a suitable illustration in seconds. This is hard to ignore, and I will continue to avail myself of the AI services that provide image generation from time to time.
On the one hand, I get it. If you perceive a gap and there is a tool available to bridge it, why not?
On the other, much larger, much heavier hand, what do you imagine is going to happen next? Not in a “cog in the agentic death-march” kind of way, but on a much more practical level. You generate an image for a blog post to attract more attention. Supposing that that advice still works here in 2026 – I have my doubts – you get the traffic at the expense of blogs that don’t. So, those other blogs start generating images too. Now… what? The competitive advantage is gone. Who gets the clicks?
“Blogging isn’t a competition though!” Then why do you care about having a generated image at all?
Not trying to single Kelly out, or really any of the specific AI enthusiasts still in my Feeds. You do you. It’s a transformative technology for coding and a few other industries, yada yada yada. I just happen to agree with the general sentiment of Anarchae:
If I asked a question on this site and got a response and went back and forth a bit, I had a pleasant interaction with a human being and feel good about the distro and its community.
If I later find out that person just copy pastes questions into an LLM and then copy pastes back in a response, or is a full on bot-run account, there is a feeling of betrayal. I thought I had a genuine human connection, but it wasn’t, it was just a computer program. Now that sours my opinion of the distro and I probably won’t bother coming back. I was given the equivilant of the Customer Service Chatbot, who would be happy about that?
No one with an internet connection is hurting for content. No doubt you could vibe code a blog tonight that automatically prompts ChatGPT to spit out a randomized topic-of-the-day post every 24 hours. Or six hours. Or 15-minutes. We aren’t here for that. We aren’t here for the AI image that is only vaguely related to the topic at hand and is more meant to be clickbait. We aren’t here for the grammatically perfect, literal textbook outlined prose with the phone emojis for some reason. Every single AI refinement makes you less distinguishable from every other (presumed) person also on the gear.
Be human. Have messy human thoughts with the wet meat between your ears. Who are we trying to impress? None of us are making any money on this and it ain’t because we got some syntax wrong.
Or don’t, I guess.
Digital Resell, 2026 Edition
The gaming news of this past week was Sony’s announcement that they are ceasing production of game discs starting in January 2028. In completely unrelated news, Sony is also removing access to ~500ish movies from customer libraries while offering zero refunds for otherwise permanently lost access to movies licenses purchased rented with real money. While the ascent and eventual domination of digital has been a long time coming, it is perhaps an especially ignoble end coming first from the same company that put out this (at the time) devasting advertisement.
There are a lot of different concerns surrounding the upcoming loss of physical media in the game sphere – Bhagpuss and others have shared a few – but I keep circling back to the fundamental, unresolved question of: do we have the right to resell things we purchased, specifically games?
Yes… but also no.
Everyone intuitively understands and accepts that a physical disc or cartridge can be resold. As soon as it becomes exclusively digital though, suddenly it is a wildly different thing… for no particularly good reason. We already have ubiquitous DRM, we already have storefronts capable of revoking access to games on an account level. What’s the hang-up? Other than unabashed corporate greed?
I made post in 2015 about this topic, which also referenced a 2012 legal outcome in the EU that stated software licenses could be resold. Considering that nothing seems to have come from that, suffice it to say there must have been some carve outs that game publishers just sailed their mega-yachts through.
My next follow-up was in 2019 where, spoilers, the issue remains unresolved. Although, at that time there was a new gaming storefront called Robot Cache that was set to revolutionize the market by allowing digital game licenses to be resold, with publishers taking a cut of the profits. I wonder where that ended up…
“Thank you sincerely for joining us on this journey,” reads the screenshot of an email purportedly from the Robot Cache Team. “While we gave it everything we had, we weren’t able to attract the user base and sales traction needed to keep the store running. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Robot Cache store.
“The store will officially close in 30 days. After that point, the platform will no longer be accessible, and users will no longer be able to play games purchased through Robot Cache, even if they’ve downloaded a full copy.” It’s the nightmare scenario of games with DRM. The email continues that the team can’t let people keep their games because the site’s “verification system” will go offline. Any “iron,” the site’s digital currency, will similarly be rendered kaput.
Oh. So the worst possible ending, eh?
I have been a PC gamer for decades now, for which a resell mechanism has not truly existed since the beginning. Why care now? Because we as consumers are losing out. I have specifically purchased almost all my Switch games as physical versions, because there is utility in being able to resell them on eBay or GameStop or whatever else. The only exceptions were Mario Kart 8 that “came with the system,” and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom which were purchased at a discount via Nintendo vouchers. For all the other games, since they cost the same either way, I essentially had a choice: convenience of not having to swap out cartridges, or being able to recapture 50% or more of the value of the original price. Option B was of greater utility to me, so that’s what I went with. Sony will be eliminating that option for everyone on their platform in 2028. That’s a loss, whether you used it or not.
I don’t expect much progress on the digital reselling front in the near future, especially under current regimes, but I do feel like the topic will become increasingly urgent. The industry has been coasting on the (occasionally court-imposed) good graces of Valve and Steam, but Gabe Newell is 63 years old. Already we sort of hand-wave away the inability to bequeath a Steam library upon death, but there’s a future in which Gabe retires/dies, Valve goes public, and all sorts of corporate tomfoolery occurs. Legally, what stops Valve from revoking access to games in your library arbitrarily? A Terms of Service… that can be amended at any time?
Sony already has us trained to accept that entire storefronts can close, such as the PSP and PSOne in 2021, and now the PS3 and Vita stores in 2027. If you previously purchased a game, you can still download it “for the foreseeable future,” but it kinda makes you think. I can still download and install Farcry 2 and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men via Steam, both of which show up as Last Played in 2011. Maybe that is a trivial expense on Steam servers, but we can imagine a scenario in which a public Valve invokes the same “adapt to consumer trends” language to essentially prune the storefront. Again, what stops them? Potentially negative PR?
I don’t imagine there would be much of a resell market for my copy of Farcry 2 or Kane & Lynch: Dead Men all these years later. And ironically, IsThereAnyDeal shows that people can buy Farcry 2 “new” for like $2.40 right now. But I feel like having some stronger sense of legal ownership even over the license is necessary to dissuade future shenanigans. Or, fine, go all the way the other direction and replace Buy/Purchase with Rent.
Axebox
There is every indication that Microsoft is set to fire a large swath of game developers and/or shut down entire studios in the next few days.
While Microsoft is weighing canceling Blade, it’s also exploring options to sell Arkane Studios. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Microsoft is trying to spin off Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory, too. GamesBeat reported this week that Microsoft is actively looking for a buyer for Undead Labs, the developers behind State of Decay. If buyers are found for these studios, then they’ll avoid being closed, but sources stress these talks could take months in some cases.
If some of those studios sound vaguely familiar, it’s because they were showcased in the recent Xbox Games, er, Showcase. Like three weeks ago. Ninja Theory is the one developing Senua and Undead Labs has State of Decay 3, a game series that I have very much enjoyed in the past. If the studios don’t find a buyer soon though, they may be shuttered and the games canceled, no matter how close (or not) to release they were.
What has been interesting about this latest round of layoff news has been the general Reddit sentiment. A few years ago, there was an appropriate level of outrage when Tango Gameworks got axed right after releasing the award-winning Hi Fi Rush. With this latest teaser round of studio closures, the reactions are, at best, ¯\(ツ)/¯. Some are straight-up supportive.
…and more and more, I find myself falling into the latter camp.
To be clear, I find Microsoft generally abhorrent. I shill for Game Pass because I consider it a great value for consumers (for now), but everything else about Microsoft is bog-standard megacorp bullshit. Asking for your games division to have a 30% profit margin like the rest of your monopolies products is absurd. Buying studios and then shutting them down so that the IPs are forever entombed is tragic, let alone the reality of layoffs in this economy generally.
However. HOWEVER. Sometimes… there’s no baby in the bathwater, and you’re hanging on to dirty bathwater for no reason. Sometimes it’s been so fucking long since you’ve checked on the baby that he’s done grown up and moved out of the house. If Undead Labs gets dissolved and we lose State of Decay 3, I will be sad. Or would have been, if I hadn’t done some cursory Google searches:
A 2022 investigation by Kotaku reported on a sexist studio culture, which was abetted by Philip Holt, the new studio head who replaced Strain, and then-head of HR Anne Schlosser.[15] Schlosser was removed after a Microsoft HR investigation. The toxic work environment, which continued after Schlosser’s departure, led to a high employee turnover rate, especially among experienced staff. These issues, combined with a lack of design vision, contributed to extensive delays in the development of State of Decay 3.[15] Employees also blamed Microsoft for not living up to its goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion by not responding to reports of abuse in a timely manner.[15]
Back in April, I wrote Game Development is Expensive for Dumb Reasons. This is the sort of thing I am talking about. Presumably not every studio has the same skeletons in their closets, but the point is that these companies are not releasing games faster because of incompetent (at best) leadership. It does not have to take 6+ years to develop a game. The original Mass Effect trilogy came out in 2007, 2010, and 2012. Can you imagine how long it would take for any other trilogy to come out these days?
Arguably, Microsoft should not have bought all these studios in the first place. Or maybe if they didn’t buy Activision Blizzard, they would have had the time to let the devs cook longer before layoffs. But it could also be true that many of these studios would/should have died on their own via natural selection. We’re used to being outraged by publishers closing studios, but I somehow doubt that Undead Labs could have gone 6+ years without another product to sell without folding on their own. Mayhap it was the Microsoft money that encouraged the foolishness and dulled the scrappy edge.
I dunno. The sympathy I have for game developers in general is at an all-time low. The live-service bubble is for sure popping, and the economics of AAA games in general is collapsing along with it. And it kind of has to, for everyone’s sake. The status quo is being made possible by only the most extreme psychological hacks, FOMO, battle passes, gacha mechanics, etc. Remember when these companies were incentivized by, you know, selling more copies of the game? The indie and AA developers remember because that is pretty much all they have access to. We should get back to that.
Soon enough, there may not be another choice.
Steam Machine is $1000+
Remember eight months ago where I imagined a fantasy of the Steam Machine costing $650? Apparently, it was a bargain at nearly twice the price:
I took that screenshot directly from the Steam interface. It’s official. Valve is legitimately selling a 512GB Steam Machine with no controller for $1049. That’s a big yikes. Suffice it to say, Valve will not be capturing the coveted Azuriel market, or arguably any reasonable market whatsoever.
The funny/tragic thing though, is that this pricing is actually pretty spot-on when it comes to off-the-shelf computer components these days. From the various Reddit posts, a few people have been able to use PC Parts Picker to find slightly cheaper configurations. For example, this one clocks in at $971. However, there is a big difference between a 6-inch cube and a bog-standard 17″x8″x17″ case.
That said, once you are in $1,428 territory, you may as well buy a CyberPower or other prebuilt PC.
Ah well. I still anticipate the Steam Machine will sell out, considering how the Steam Deck also sold out despite getting a huge markup. At this price though, I just don’t see it affecting the broader videogame market in the same way that the Steam Deck did. I never bought the Deck, but it absolutely influenced what other companies offered in the handheld space. In this case, the Steam Machine is likely just another grave marker for the AI madness that has gripped the economy.
Stop Killing Games Stopped, Possibly Killed
You may or may not have heard about the Stop Killing Games movement, which was an attempt to raise awareness and foster legislation around the games industry predilection towards, well, killing games they sold. For example, it is not uncommon these days for single-player games to authenticate or “phone home” on start-up. If the publisher decides to shut down that authentication server, whoops, your game is bricked. Other multiplayer games may feature both online and local multiplayer modes, but will still be nonfunctional even via local connections if the overall game is shut down.
Recently, the movement made it all the way to the European Commission, where it had perhaps its best hope of achieving something actionable. Unfortunately, it fell short.
The Commission considers that at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep video games playable after they stop being provided commercially. This is due, also, to existing intellectual property rights. Under EU copyright law, rights holders enjoy exclusive rights over their creations. In addition to copyright, other intellectual property rights may also be relevant as they may protect different visual and technological aspects of a video game.
Existing EU consumer law already provides for important safeguards protecting the economic interests of consumers. Video game providers must inform consumers about the duration and the conditions for terminating the contract before the consumers signs up for the video game. The Directive on digital content and digital services provides consumers with remedies when the content or service provided does not conform with the contract and what consumers could reasonably expect. Consumers may be entitled to proportionate refund of their purchases.
My title is a bit sensationalist, as the movement continues on along other avenues. In the US, there is the Protect Our Games Act moving forward in the California legislature. Back in the EU, I believe the focus is now on the Digital Fairness Act, where some of the goals may still be achievable.
What I really wanted to talk about with this topic though, is the frustrating counter-arguments surrounding it. Specifically, the sort of “you can’t just legislate that” or “how it is achievable needs to be expressly defined” arguments. Uh, no. As demonstrated by the apparently worldwide age verification push – and insane attacks against VPN usage – shit gets mandated by fiat all the damn time.
I understand that that is… perhaps not the sort of comparison that invites sympathy to a movement. Nevertheless, the sort of reductive, prescriptionist mindset of “you can’t do that because it doesn’t work that way” grinds my gears when, in fact, people have to put up with crazy, non-consumer-friendly changes all the time. See also: Congressional approval for wars longer than 60 days, repaying unconstitutional tariffs, rampant corruption, etc, etc, etc. Just because we have normalized “buying” revokable licenses to play the games in question doesn’t mean we have to accept it forever.
Hell, go nuclear with it: force game companies to replace the words Buy/Purchase with RENT, if it’s in fact just a revokable license. Let GOG and any other storefront that allows for offline downloads continue to use Buy/Purchase, assuming the game can still be played with the servers shut off. “But Azuriel, what constitutes ‘playable’ if it requires 100 TB servers to function?” “What if the devs ‘update’ the game to be Pong in the last patch before shutdown and claim that they made the game playable?” Simple – see ya in court! Maybe have some teeth in there so that there is an automatic refund (to include DLC and cash shop) mechanism until/unless the publishers demonstrate they were in the right.
Things don’t have to be shitty. We used to own things, no matter what the EULAs said. If you still have a functioning Playstation 2 and a PS2 game, you can go play it right now. Warner Brothers doesn’t get to remotely delete the DVDs on your shelves just because the studios merged and then shut down. Your books are (probably) not written in disappearing ink that takes proprietary lamps to display.
“But what about all the potential games this could hurt?” Fuck’em. No, seriously, if the economic viability of your entire design is predicated on smoke and mirrors and otherwise leaving town before the bill comes due, maybe don’t make that game. Maybe nothing of value will be lost.
I dunno, guys. I never played Anthem, even when it was “free” on Game Pass. But it’s gone now for everyone, including the people who bought it, forever. Even though, technically, you could spin up a private server, assuming you don’t get sued. Sure, IP owners own the IP, so if they don’t want to sell it anymore, that is their right; Disney used to “vault” their classic movies on a rotating basis, presumably as a marketing ploy or whatever. If you had bought Cinderella though, you could still watch it. If someone can prove they purchased Anthem, what’s the actual harm in letting them run a copy?
The industry just seems to keep coming back around to having pirates offer the superior version of the product, e.g. one that works. I understand why things are set up this way, but they don’t have to be. Nor do I have to figure it out for them. Maybe fewer $80 game rentals is exactly what we need.
Gaming News Roundup
A lot of gaming news came out this week. Here is what I have been keeping an eye on.
Fable (Feb 2027)
I never got into the Fable series back in the day, as they were XBox exclusives for a long while. Technically, the first and third entries are in my Steam library, but Fable 3 crashing during an auto-save didn’t cut it in 2016, let alone a decade later. What is cutting things, is this 30-minute gameplay trailer.
The systems presented are very gamified, as I am sure the originals were as well, but I was impressed nonetheless with the overall game vibe. “Romance any random NPC” telegraphs that romance isn’t that deep, but maybe that doesn’t matter if you take a shining to a particular barkeep or general narrative. No doubt there will be forum posts detailing RimWorld-esque grotesqueries such as swooning the orphan whose parents you murdered for no reason.
But you know what? Good on them. When you build a sandbox, sometimes you are going to uncover some buried shit.
Anyway, I’m excited. It’s also going to be on Game Pass, so there’s that too.
Palworld 1.0 (July 10th)
After my original forays into Palworld two years ago, I have not touched the game since. While the zeitgeist has moved on, I was waiting for precisely this particular bit of news, e.g. a version 1.0 release. I do not have grand delusions that any developer takes versioning seriously, but if you are going to pick a particular point in time to make final determination as to the quality of a game, I figure 1.0 is about as good as anything.
You can watch the latest trailer here. It has nothing on the very original teaser trailer, but then again, nothing else really could.
Valheim 1.0 (September 9th)
Same deal as Palworld. Played for almost 50 hours five years ago, and stopped once I ran out of Early Access road (and encountered placeholder monster drops). I have some concerns about what I have heard about the Mistlands experience already in the game, but we shall see. Trailer here.
Abiotic Factor: Entropic Break (Autumn 2026)
I almost didn’t include this one, as I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. Specifically, Abiotic Factor is getting a DLC released later this year. Which is good! But I spent nearly 160 hours playing the game already, and I’m not certain whether I want (or am able to be) sucked in back in. Trailer here.
Guild Wars 3, Anti-Hyped
I had intended to make a post earlier in the week, when rumors that ArenaNet were planning a big reveal at Summer Game Fest began surfacing. But since things were going to be revealed on Friday, I figured I may as well wait. In any case, the rumors are true: Guild Wars 3 is a thing.
I could not be any less hyped. In fact, I feel negative hype.
The trailer is whatever. It’s fine. The issue is that this announcement effectively kills Guild Wars 2 for me.
Although I haven’t been posting too much about it, I have low-key been playing GW2 for several sessions each week pretty consistently. My goals have mostly revolved around completing the weekly Wizard Vault quests to earn currency to purchase some of the account upgrades in said Wizard Vault (bag slots, etc), with some farming routes on the side. From a game perspective, both of those activities were in service of working towards additional Legendary items to share amongst my characters. And remember, getting a Legendary means you never have to worry about that specific gear slot again.
…until there is an entirely new game that obsoletes all your work.
This isn’t my first rodeo – I’ve played WoW for more than a decade, and every expansion had green gear better than your raid purples. The continuity though came in the form of cosmetics/transmogs, titles, mounts, toys, Achievements, a sense of pride and accomplishment, gold, etc. There will undoubtedly be Hall of Monuments deal wherein you can get some exclusive skins in the new game for having X or Y achievements in GW2, just as there was coming from GW1, but it is not the same.
I dunno. People still play “dead”/maintenance mode MMOs all the time. Of all the alternatives out there, GW2 remains a fairly unique example of one where horizontal progression means you can indeed do most anything you want to as soon as you hit the level cap. If I were solely interested in exploration or drinking in the scenery or whatever, then there would still be a lot to like. However, I still prefer form and function, and if not for the hitherto meaningful function of Legendary crafting, I don’t see much marrow left on the bones for me. Nevermind how difficult it will be acquiring the hundreds of components of these items once the population winnows down, events fail for lack of players, and economy withers.
We shall see, I guess. Guild Wars 3 is going to launch into beta in Fall 2027. No word yet on any plans for future content in GW2 leading up to that (or afterwards).
In An Age 
In-Game Ads
Aug 15
Posted by Azuriel
I was doomscrolling today and came across this Youtube Short from Legendary Drops concerning in-game advertising being more fully explored by EA, Microsoft, and Sony, all practically at once:
I actually watch quite a bit of Legendary Drops, as he has some rather humorous (and compelling) takedowns of AAA studios and the nonsense they are engaging with these days. Which, apparently, includes feeling the temperature on including advertising within the games they are selling. The Short itself does not contain links to specific articles, so I had to do some digging around for the links.
As the Sony article points out, this is not everyone’s first rodeo:
It is 2026 and we are probably all well past this being a particular shock. F2P mobile games have had advertising since forever, including more pernicious gameplay-affecting ones. Indeed, one of my most-played mobile games is Tavern Rumble, a roguelite deck-builder that will give you the equivalent of +2 Strength, healing, etc, if you watch some ads after each fight. That’s… not OK. I ended up buying the “ad remover” for the game for $10 or whatever years ago, but even now, it’s hard to say whether the boosts are just extra, or whether the game was specifically balanced around them. For example, having played Candy Crush, you could not possibly convince me that some of the RNG in certain levels are beatable without power-ups, whether accrued for free over time or purchased directly.
And don’t forget the weird shit too, like Monster Energy drinks in Death Stranding:
At the moment, it is not entirely clear the exact direction the enshittification is going. When looking at the EA page, they are talking about “dynamic, real-time placements, from stadium signage to custom in-game content.” Any sort of sports game would probably look uncanny without real-ish ads plastered about, considering that is what everyone sees IRL watching from home. Same with the hoods of racing cars, etc. With XBox, it sounds a lot more like a “free with ads” subscription tier rather than seeing a Microsoft Copilot banner in the Master Chief’s visor. With Sony… who even knows, to be honest. Sony has been losing so much money lately that it would not surprise me that they end up being the worst ad offenders eventually.
Steam sometimes gets touted as a bulwark of consumer protection… and it’s true, to a point. Steam does not run ads in the client, and specifically forbids games from having mobile-esque ads:
That same policy does allow “product placements,” which is largely reasonable. As jarring as seeing Monster Energy drinks in your videogame can be, it is difficult to draw a distinction between that and the fact that a very Norman Reedus is the one doing so. As long as you don’t have to drink a verification can, I guess it can slide. Christ, was that really 13 years ago?
In any case, as odious as advertising is generally and how annoying it is seeing it infiltrate yet another facet of our lives, I feel like it may end up working itself out. If a particular game is festooned with ads, and it breaks immersion, don’t buy that game. If there are ads in the storefront, well, yeah… stores often do. Just about the worse-case scenario might be forcing ads to display prior to playing a game, which sounds like what Microsoft is testing in the context of a “free streaming” offering. Which is a tradeoff you ostensively signed up for.
Ultimately though, the days for any kind of corporate shenanigans may be numbered. The entire business model around AAA gaming is on the verge of collapse, so I kinda doubt even the C-suite are going to gamble throwing ads into their next 6-year, $300+ million game and have that be the reason it failed. Sony can take their toys off Steam and go home, but hilariously, their ability to output said toys within their own console generation has the same upper limits as everyone else. Let them release a $1000+ PS6 with five exclusive games, a locked-down storefront, and sprinkle some intrusive ads for flavor and see what happens.
Posted in Commentary
5 Comments
Tags: Enshittification, In-Game Advertising, Legendary Drops, Sony, Verification Can