Do it, ads on every screen please. Put so many ads that we can’t even see the product we (over)paid for
Not in my games, because I ain’t buying such garbage
With the steadily increasing processing power available, refining AI video generation, and internet connections being ever more mandatory the end result will be AI generated ads inserted into false loading screens.
There have been games with ad space that could be changed, billboards and posters, there will be more of that in the future. You won’t see fake products put in the game to flesh out the environment, you will see real products put in the game as marketing.
The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to in the real world will be mirrored, if not exceeded, in videogames and that makes me sick.
Marketing departments are just behind corporate lawyers, corporate consultants, and executives in the line to hell.
On the other hand, I’m also expecting AI powered ad blockers lol
A “simple” mod would probably work, but we know how bad things are getting with game devs so I would expect them to do everything they can to prevent circumventing their ad revenue. Streaming games will also make anti-ad measures far more difficult and publishers are going to try and make all games streaming for “security and product quality”. In 20 years the older gamers are going to be fuming at all the BS compared to how things were.
Honestly, I’m just expecting something like a program that runs in the background and blocks/blurs all things that are shown on the screen and are recognized as ads, with the option to exclude certain objects from being filtered and thus training the model. With the speed at which AI is developing, I don’t see that as being too difficult to develop in a few years. It could even run on your monitor’s hardware, kinda like MSI’s AI gaming monitor. Or on a special video cable with a little chip inside. Pretty much impossible to detect with anti-cheat too.
The Rainbow Six game in Las Vegas had billboard ads back in the day. I was kinda surprised it didn’t get worse since then. There’s a Penny Arcade comic for it.
I’m sure the very thoughtful part will be about how much money it can bring in without people getting too upset about it.
