I’m kinda surprised someone hasn’t tried to disrupt web advertising to show attractive and non-intrusive ads that people actually might want to click on. Something akin to magazine ads.
I used to use a podcast app that displayed small attractive banners that advertised other podcasts that I found useful and left on even though I could’ve disabled them.
As a support to that, it seems odd that websites don't try having truly uninstrusive ads you didn't mind seeing, as I think I'd turn my adblocker off on those websites, but they all become awful and unusable. I guess they all subcontract the ads out and those companies have no motivation to moderate themselves
However, I don't think there's any way for youtube to show adverts that I'll tolerate if there's any way to avoid it.
I’ve been skipping ads in videos since fast forwarding through ads on shows that I recorded on my VCR player, hard to imagine going back.
*Legion* wrote:I have Defector and Aftermath bookmarked, but I really wish they were more like "magazine subscription" prices to subscribe to, not "streaming service" prices. They're each even pricier than The Athletic, and The Athletic is a whole different beast in terms of scale.
The issue is, and I'm not saying this to disagree with you just to expand a bit, is that magazine subscriptions are used to sell ads. They're a 'guaranteed' audience that ad sales departments use to fill up 50-60% of the magazine page space.
The new independent sites are doing it by staying away from advertising because the model has collapsed and chasing clicks leads to bad long term content decisions.
Although this does make me wonder if there's a market for a more magazine like model? A significant proportion of the page space dedicated to curated relevant advertising without pop-ups, pop-unders and all the annoying stuff that makes using sites a nightmare that won't trip ad-blockers. Then sell access at magazine subscription level pricing.
In all honestly, probably not. And it would be a huge administrative task. But it would be cool to see someone try it.
Yeah, I heard someone describe the "original sin" of the internet as being that news sites gave away their content for free, and everyone got used to that. Aftermath and other similar sites are trying to figure out a way to stay afloat that doesn't involve the ad model, and it is extremely expensive to have multiple full time people on staff doing reporting. I can't support every single site or writer i've followed over the years, but I can at least pick one or two.
Well if you're worried about $75 for quality news media, I'm here to tell you $70 for a video game also ain't cutting it these days.
Square Enix? That's a self-inflicted wound.
The new independent sites are doing it by staying away from advertising because the model has collapsed and chasing clicks leads to bad long term content decisions.
And I do appreciate that. But boy do those $80 subscriptions add up in a hurry. It's just such a high barrier to entry. It makes it so that I end up only spending on my "A" tier sites, the ones I really really want, and so everything in my "B" tier ends up getting $0 from me.
$80 dollars doesn't even add up as a replacement for showing ads. Let's be generous and say an ad CPM is $3, that is $0.003 per ad view (often it is much lower).
Let's take an average user visiting a site to read articles:
3 ads per page, 10 page views per day, 30 days per month = 900 ads per month = 900 * $0.003 = $2.70 per month = $32.40 per year in ad revenue from that user.
Where do they get $60 or $75 or $80 from?
The entire problem with the ad model for gaming sites is that it's not paying enough to sustain these sites and the people working for them.
It makes sense then it would require more than that to sustain full time salaries, paying freelancers, administrative and business costs, etc etc etc.
As someone who works in marketing, I believe the worst thing news sites have done besides giving content away for free is to make ads clickable. No audience you truly value is going to click on your ads! It's such a weird, spam-enabling behavior, and Google convinced publishers it would be worth it.
Right, in most cases what more am I going to learn about how well Cascade cleans dishes by clicking on their link? A view should be more than enough, that's all the engagement I had with advertisements before the internet and its all the engagement I want now.
I drove by a billboard once and tried to get out and click on it… it didn’t work for some reason.
Concord Is Suddenly Getting Pulled Offline With Sony Promising Full Refunds
PlayStation hero shooter Concord will be taken offline on September 6, 2024 and all players will receive a full refund, Sony announced today.Announced on the PlayStation Blog, director Ryan Ellis said "while many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended."
Concord will therefore be taken offline so Sony and developer Firewalk Studios can "explore options, including those that will better reach our players."The game will be removed from sale immediately and anyone who purchased on the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct will be refunded to their original payment methods. Those who purchased on Steam and the Epic Games Store will be refunded in the coming days.
Physical refunds are a tad trickier but players can check with individual retailers to obtain a refund. Sony will presumably organise a system with them itself that allows all refunds to be processed fully. "Once refunded, players will no longer have access to the game," Sony made clear.
Concord pulled less than two weeks after launch
Concord arrived August 23, 2024, meaning it has been removed from sale just 11 days after launch and taken offline for all players a mere two weeks after. Even those who bought Concord will no longer be able to play after September 6.
Its launch was nothing short of disastrous, with analysts telling IGN it has likely sold as few as 25,000 units. It debuted to a tragic 697 peak concurrent players on Steam, a number that made the 12,786 players of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which was dubbed a disappointment by Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav and caused a $200 million hit to revenue, look like a titan.This comes after eight years of development and presumably tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars, spent by Sony, a company already said to be shifting gears away from a live service heavy future. Sony president Hiroki Totoki committed to launching just six of 12 live service games in development, and one based on The Last of Us has already been canceled.
I know what the market needs: more saturation!
Who is shocked that generic hero shooter number 14 did not jump to the top of the sales charts?
No one probably but the level at which it failed us still somewhat remarkable I think.
No one probably but the level at which it failed us still somewhat remarkable I think.
Yeah. I wasn't expecting it to do well, but this level of failure is somewhat unprecedented, especially from a company like Sony.
The whiplash of going from the incredible Hell Divers 2 launch to the disastrous Concord launch will surely lead to some interesting discussions within Sony.
Hmm, it's almost as if something as chaotic and noisy as video game development, marketing and sales is difficult to accurately predict!
Super risky to chance trends in gaming when games take so long to develop. Most trends die out before the game is ready.
No, no, don't shift away from live service games. Anything but that.
/sarcasm
Six live service games in the next 18 months still sounds like a flood to me. If that counts as tapping the brakes, I think we've already lost our bearings.
The article is from November so… plans may have changed.
I hope Marathon gets canceled into oblivion.
Bringing back Marathon to make a Tarkov clone is disgusting.
But also, AI to potentially speed up parts of development is bad
(just throwing a grenade here really. Customers hate how long games take to develop, hate the high cost of games, and also hate AI with a kind of blanket hate. I think there's room for streamlining parts of development, even parts of development teams. AA and AAA teams are way too f*cking big)
AAA can still work though (points at BG3 and Wu Kong).
Just gotta get the pricing model and value proposition correct.
Asking gamers to dump constant streams of money into something that doesn't stand out from the crowd is wistful thinking.
If I look at my teen son, he is an avatar of short attention span gaming - in the space of a few weeks, he's gone through at least 3 new games (blessedly all but one of them was free to play) chasing the zitgeist of trending stuff. Each of these games he's tried seem to have novel ideas but don't last the distance. Meanwhile I'm approaching 600 hours on Battle Brothers with mods.
I genuinely wonder where game development should be headed.
(just throwing a grenade here really. Customers hate how long games take to develop, hate the high cost of games, and also hate AI with a kind of blanket hate. I think there's room for streamlining parts of development, even parts of development teams. AA and AAA teams are way too f*cking big)
I've said this before, but I think a lot of dev teams will already have started using gen-AI for things that would previously have come from storebought assets, texture packs, stock services, etc. I just hope that the first team to get widely pilloried for it is a AAA team and not indies..
Super risky to chance trends in gaming when games take so long to develop. Most trends die out before the game is ready.
Yep.
The Guardian reviewed Concord on 23 August. I only watched a short preview video, but - in the comments below the article - I wrote:
I have a couple of thoughts about ConcordFirst, I wonder whether Concord is coming to market just a little bit too late. Overwatch was launched eight years ago, and Apex Legends celebrated its fifth birthday earlier this year. But I've not seen or heard much buzz about the 'hero shooter' of late, beyond expressions of dismay about Overwatch 2.
Is there still air left in the hero shooter balloon?
Second, the trailer in the article revealed a fairly cookie-cutter product, lacking a little in soul. The arenas looked like - well - arenas rather than real places (I thought Apex Legends really got this right). And the heroes look and sound like 'Guardians of the Galaxy' knock-offs - staying just the right side of an IP lawsuit.
I suspect that Sony has a Battleborn on their hands rather than an Apex...
But also, AI to potentially speed up parts of development is bad
(just throwing a grenade here really. Customers hate how long games take to develop, hate the high cost of games, and also hate AI with a kind of blanket hate. I think there's room for streamlining parts of development, even parts of development teams. AA and AAA teams are way too f*cking big)
I disagree with some of this.
First, I don't think most customers have any idea how long it takes games to develop. They simply aren't following the industry, or specific publishers/developers, closely enough. Don't get me wrong. There is definitely a small sub-set of the market who do care. They are people like us here on GwJ. But most customers aren't like this. If they were, then I doubt we'd see so many gaming news magazines and websites closing.
Similarly, I don't think most customers know or care if their games employ AI. (Indeed, I don't think most customers know or care how games are actually made.)
If you are a game developer working on a game with a real financial budget, you should be investigating every tool to reduce the cost and timeline for getting it out the door. I would assume that every major studio is using some AI like programmes in their pipelines.
I don’t think anyone is ethically using it to generate art assets from whole cloth and current LLMs seem to have trouble generating repeatably the same style for lots of different assets. But even ten years ago we were using machine learning to adapt human made animations to multiple constrained ik rigs (animate one body size, generate the other sizes). If you can write a clear definition of what good is, then machine learning is a very good force multiplier. It’s all just procedural generation eventually.
If you can ethically train the LLM (without plagiarism), then I don’t see any problem with using it in your game. I don’t even see how it would hurt artists in the main studio (though I expect the outsourcing studios would be affected, but we can have a separate conversation about pay and conditions in those jobs).
Ethical training is a topic probably best avoided here.. But for the rest, at the level of nuance you're talking about Dove, yeah definitely most/all game studios are using various tech that qualifies as "AI" to some extent. But I think sooner or later some notable game will be the first to be popularly perceived as having being made with AI, and will get pilloried for it.
And I think that's already happened in some small niche circles, but not yet in a big "zeitgeist" way, but it feels like a matter of time.
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