So if you’ve never seen his videos there’s a great youtube vlogger by the name of CGP Grey.
Really great stuff about political science, history, and science. Well made, too.
Well anyway, this week he made a video about ads.
Here it is if you’re interested, but you don’t need to watch it in order to understand the point I’m about to make.
So in the video he basically explains how ads work on youtube, and putting an emphasis on how vlogger (him) receives money when people watch ads all the way through or click on banners.
In other words, he is basically saying “click on the ads to give me a tip!” without saying “click on the ads to give me a tip!”.
Pretty clever if you ask me.
ANYWAY, my point.
Why don’t we do this in games?
Why don’t we have things that say “Make sure to visit our sponsors!” or when there’s a loading screen?
Because it tends to be against the policy of the advertisers. They want users to check out the ads because they are interested in the content. Not because they want an in game reward, or to help the developer.
Encouraging people who aren’t interested to click on ads just wastes everyone’s time. It results in lower quality ad traffic. Which means the advertisers pay less money for the ad. Which eventually turns into the dev needing to put up more ads in order to get the same level of money. Which makes games worse for players.
So do yourself a favour and don’t click on ads unless you are actually interested in seeing the content.
People hate ads. You could do this, and it would just make people hate them more. And make you look foolish in the process, not to mention violate the rules of the ad publishers.
As a YouTube viewer, I just ignore them and wait a few seconds for the skip this ad button to appear and then go back to whatever I was watching. If the frequency is high, I unsubscribe from the channel.
As far as games with ads go, I do not buy them as a rule unless there is some incredibly compelling reason to do so. I would rather spend $5 for a game with no ads. Right now there is not a single game on my phone that is ad based. On my PC, there never has been one and most likely never will be.
I think that certain games definitely feature “pleasue support as on patreon” not to mention “please rate us on app store and please consider buying pro version”. Not to mention games featuring product placement (energizer batteries in Alan Wake, for example).
