I keep saying it but we need to ban ads. They do too much harm to society to be allowed to continue.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Plotting?? They've been there for ages.
https://medium.com/re-verb/a-brief-history-of-advertising-in-video-games-615339e2053f
Neat article!
I think they could have included games that came with cereal boxes because some of them were demos for the games, but others also served as ads of the cereal itself like Chex Quest, similar to Pepsi Man.
And I think Obama's campaign was the first political campaign to advertise on a video game, right? I think that would have been cool to include in there.
i remember companies at fairs/expos handing out floppies with dos games that were basically just playable ads
Why do we allow companies to waste our lives with so many ads in the US? I refuse to watch them. I grew up watching TV and constant commercials every fifteen minutes. It was and is ridiculous.
They can't put ads in my game of i don't play their shit.
Don't worry, just give it a few more years without intervention and thanks to the power of AI, all your smart TVs and gaming monitors will force ads into your games for you, therefore bypassing the need for devs to do it manually.
This feels like prophecy and really hate it. We need to burn it all down and start over.
Plotting?
This game is from 23 years ago and you get your magic from Skittles.
Love that game. The gameplay was not good, but the script was hilarious. They knew exactly how ridiculous the Skittles connection was.
It's also where I learned that the singular of Skittles is "Skittles". No such thing as a Skittle.
I dunno why but licensed games feel different somehow. It WAS built from the ground up to do that.
The biggest problem is updates. The game may be amazing and pristine, but vX.Y rolls around and includes a bunch of ads. Everybody already paid for it and already invested dozens or hundreds of hours into the game, so what are they supposed to do? They have a personal stake in something and then had the rug pulled. Online marketplaces seem to have made this kind of bad faith behavior much more common. I find it so hard to trust even the companies behind great products because of how common these kinds of bait and switch behaviors have become.
I mean, a lot of them already had ads, they just weren't getting paid for it.
Go through a game and see a can of coke or other name brand item laying around in the open world, I wouldn't mind if they got paid for having Pepsi cams strewn about instead of coke.
But if they're going to be adding billboards to the roadways in games specifically to show ads or forcing gamers to watch an add to advance to the next region/level etc that's crossing the line.
I wouldn't mind about the billboards as long as they're appropriate. In sports games they have the ads around the pitch, in driving games there are often billboards anyway just showing fake products.
Yeah that makes sense. I'm thinking more along the lines of like, if you're playing borderlands and start seeing decrepit billboards advertising the all new 2026 Honda Ridgeline or whatever the fuck.
They already do, it's called a "crossover"
Lots of games have had ads since the 00s or earlier (online & mobile games). But some $60 games also have literal ads. Like sports games or whatever.
if the suckers keep buying why not? lines must go up.
You know what shiny lady? Fuck it, yeah, you're right.
I just now found out it's the same actress who plays the silver surfer in the new fantastic four movie and Ruth Langmore the Ozark series, Julia Garner.
I started watching Ozark right after I saw the movie, not for any related reason, and now that I saw this post I just thought "oh, I have no idea who played the silver surfer, gotta look that up".
She was also the teacher in Weapons!
Glad I only play movie crossover games on the Atari 2600
E.T. Really isn’t so bad if you know what you’re doing.
I love to sit in the woods and bask in the cabin that my dad and I built it. There is no internet or cell phone coverage.
Some people said it was too far off the beaten track and possibly dangerous to live so far from civilisation if there's some kind of emergency, but he used to just say that "you aren't welcome here" while I sipped my diet coke. Nothing compares to freedom.
Man long time ago I thought it was immersion when EA sports games first had ads. Bring back the polygon games.
What is the image source
I think the newest Fantastic 4, with Pedro Pascal