Not even your Sims are safe from advertisements.
Video games are often seen as an escape from reality, but they're still not an escape from capitalism. A Redditor on r/ABoringDystopia was frustrated after finding hidden ads in their mobile game, SimCity.
"I love in-game ads, they're so much fun," they sarcastically wrote.
The advertisement is for Brock University, a public college in Ontario, Canada, and was plastered on an in-game billboard.
SimCity and other games in the Sims franchise are developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. Unfortunately for the original poster and other Sims enjoyers, there might be even more in-game ads to come. Last year, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said the EA team is considering "dynamic ad insertion," putting more ads like this SimCity billboard into its games.Â
"We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences," Wilson said, per Kotaku.
Gamers weren't too happy about EA's decision, and Valve wasn't either. Valve, a video game development company and owner of the video game distribution platform Steam, fought back against other game developers' financial reliance on annoying in-game ads.
Steam recently updated its documentation to discourage "paid advertising as a business model in their game, such as requiring players to watch or otherwise engage with advertising in order to play, or gating gameplay behind advertising." While it doesn't directly ban ads in games, it makes ad-abundant business models more difficult to market on Steam.
Advertising is taking over — the average American sees hundreds or thousands of them a day. They're on your phone, on your TV, on the roads, in the grocery store, and even in the ocean. Ads promote overconsumption, which contributes to planet-overheating pollution through the production of goods and inundation of landfills.
Commenters had mixed feelings on the in-game ads.
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"To be fair I would much rather have ads almost seamlessly integrated into the game than having intrusive pop-ups with fake Xs to trick you to click on the ad," one user said.
"This would be enough to make me attempt for a refund on the game," another Redditor wrote. "And regardless, never touch it again. Gaming is a thing I do to escape from the constant commercial hellscape."
A third commenter would "rather just make a one time purchase of the game upfront and not have to watch ads at all."
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