Jimquisition: In the Hall of the Mountain Dew

LostintheWick

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ForgottenPr0digy said:
Jimothy Sterling said:
Jandau said:
All this is well and good, but what I want to know is how does Jim know what hedgehog piss tastes like? :p
Hedgehogs can't hold it in when you're trying to suck their little hedgecocks.
are you raping sonic the hedgehog??
Why not? Everybody else associated with him already has :)
 

BooTsPs3

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Feb 2, 2011
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I completely agree with most of this. It's the shameless, in your face advertising like this that bothers me. If used right, advertising can both net the dev some more money, and make the game more immersive. For example, the ipod in MGS4. Advertisement, yes. But it was a lot closer to reality than some random in-game mp3 player with a generic name. It made it feel a little more real.

Imagine seeing something like Mcdonalds restaurants in an open world game. This makes the in-game world seem more like the real world, and nets the dev some extra money. Granted, it needs to flow like the rest of the world. None of that "Pepsi machines can't be thrown in bionic commando because it associates the brand name with violence" crap.

I feel advertising is OK in cases like i stated above, but crap like this with halo and mountain dew, and uncharted and subway sickens me. It's nothing more than a cash grab and benefits the consumer in no way at all.

P.S. Jim, you said MS charges devs up to Forty Thousand Grand to patch their games. 40 million dollars is a lot. I guess it explains the "poor" developers haha.
 

Beryl77

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Wow, hadn't even heard of that barcode scanning campaign. Now that's just ridiculous. Not much we can do though, beside calling them out on their bullshit and not buying their bullshit.

Anyway, does Mountain Dew really taste that bad? We don't have any where I live.
 

loc978

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What's in that bottle may indeed taste like hedgehog piss (I wouldn't know, I've never had hedgehog piss)... but most certainly does not taste like sugar. That wasn't Throwback, so it tastes like high fructose corn syrup, a distinctly different brand of cloyingly sweet.

As for the rest of the video... dayum, you're tolerant of AAA assrape. I still take issue with the actions they take, and you only take issue with the wording and being treated like an idiot? I still say it takes a special brand of idiocy (or maybe it's just a behavioral addiction? I dunno, never had one of those, so it seems like the same thing to me) to continue buying when these are their marketing tactics.
 

MortisLegio

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I'm fine with a company have tie-in campaigns, so long as the "savings" come down; Like a free piece of DLC or no more online passes. I fine with them putting ads on Xbox live if they charge less for Xbox live. I have no problem with companies doing any of these so long as the savings come down to the customers, which will make the company more money. If they aren't going to give the customers something back for all this then they should just admit that they are greedy and want to have a money pit like Scrooge McDuck.
 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Jul 18, 2009
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I never saw those Uncharted 3 Subway commercials... and now I wish I never did.

Fuck, that was a sickening display! Shame on you, Naughty Dog.
 

General Vengeance

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Now, now Mountain Dew and Tequila tastes great together. (Lots of Tequila)
Then again, paint thinner and Mr. Clean taste good too with lots of Tequila.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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Hrmmmm, well I think the problem is the corperate mentality as many people have pointed out. Corperations nowadays are not simply out to make a fair profit (take in more money than they spend), but to grow at a specific, forecasted rate. The issue is that you have a bunch of suits who have experts telling them that to be considered successful they will need to grow "X" amount in the next billing cycle to remain competitive. These forecasts being based on what the most successful titles in video games are making. Basically if your FPS makes a hundred million dollars in profit, and someone else's makes 250 million that's considered a failure. Likewise if you don't make X % more money than you did at the same time the year before that's considrred a failure. It's not like a business is going to say "whelps we spent a few hundred million, but made it all back plus $50k that's a win", if projections say a company should say make 20% more this year than last year and you don't do that, then it's considered a failure.

That's insane, but it's sadly how the corperate mentality works. In part because the shareholders view the whole thing as a game themselves, and don't generally have any vested interest in any product. If a stock isn't performing they just dump it and buy one that will.

When it comes to servers and such, common sense dictates that maintaining servers should be considered as part of the $60 price tag and development costs. Sadly that's not the case nowadays, as those "costs" are a constant drain, companies want other revenue streams to maintain them. After all they want to take their big lumps of cash and spend or invest them, not keep them around to pay upkeep fees and spend years finding out exactly how much money they made after interest fades and the servers close down.
 

Wesley Brannock

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Any time I see a video game company that made huge costly products thats backed by market ads , huge customer output , D . L . C , merchandising , pre-orders of products not even released. Then insists that those same customers pay an extra tab by subscription fee for the production costs that the GAME COMPANY made. All I think is this.

 

Mr_Terrific

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Wonder why he jumped on Uncharted from last year instead of CoD and it's eventual eat and drink shit for XP deals with Mtn. Dew but we still get boned out of another $50 for maps every year. Surely that's more relevant, right?

Or what about the fact that the Robert Florence thing happened and Jim didn't have the stones to talk about that of what we already know? You'd think Jim would be all over a story like that.
 

ex275w

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I think the problem is that yes, companies are looking out to make money, but partnering with other companies to sell you two products at the same time is stupid (it runs in the moronic logic that the people who like Subway will run Uncharted and vice versa) and usually only one of the companies ends up losing money. It's the wrong way to make money.

The problem is that Star Wars and other huge franchises like Transformers are American-made and are a HUGE part of American capitalist culture. Halo, Gears of War are trying to copy the profits Lucasarts has made since the 80's. Star Wars whored itself successfully and has made millions with toys, novels, comics, video games, cereal deals, etc. Master Chief and Mountain Dew are carrying that legacy

This is why you won't see an European franchise like Discworld whoring itself for money. In Japan, everyone in the anime industry is trying to copy Neon Genesis Evangelion and whoring themselves to the same degree.

Any thoughts on my conclusion?

EDIT: (Also big franchises are the only ones that can afford to be the littlest, prettiest whores on the market)
 

Arif_Sohaib

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Jan 16, 2011
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The development costs are still very large for AAA games, so they do need the money.
Smaller ones don't need it because their budgets are smaller and if a large publisher is releasing them they would not like to gamble too much on it.
For example, Halo can be used to make money and then the money could be given to newer IPs(I am not saying it will, but it could).
Would you still think it is this bad if 2K used these tactics to raise money for extremely risky stuff like Spec Ops?
 

Strazdas

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May 28, 2011
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I dont mind advertisement in games when it done well. like you know when you walk in a town that has like 100 billboards and 10% of them are real advertisements, or when a character use a laptop in cutscene and it happens to have a HP brand on it. that would simply look like "hey have to use a laptop from somone" type of stuff.
What i get pissed off is when they want you to pay 15 dollars for what should be ashamed to even call it a patch.
And subscription is why i will never use xbox live, to hell with such idiocity.
 

Shiro No Uma

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Nov 10, 2009
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Nice. Many things I had never thought about, however I feel like there is an even more interesting trend in the current gaming economy. Many of the big companies, Microsoft, Sony, etc., operate in the red mainly because of other divisions of the corporation (device manufacturing typically). The strange thing is that it sounds like Jim is saying that the gaming divisions more then make up for those loses, i.e. the gaming community is actually not just paying so "at some point a game needs to make money," but also for failing brands in technology. The crazy thing is that Apple, who not only operates in the black but has billions in the bank, seems to be looked down upon for having one of the most widely popular and easy to use store fronts with a mostly health platform for delivering gaming content.
 

Gearhead mk2

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Ashoten said:
This is why I am a PC gamer and Steam is my friend.
Yeah, Steam isn't exactly immune either. But I don't think anyone here is going to listen to my argument. I dared to suggest that Steam wasn't the second coming of Christ, so I'll most likely get burned to a crisp now.
 

Terminate421

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Jim I usually agree with points but most people DIDN'T complain when Iron Man or any other movie tried this sort of thing. All of the sudden a couple big hits feel like trying it and there you go, rage at it.

Also good news, Halo 4 does not do Online passes, as much as it seems not like it, Microsoft cares about how they handle Halo. Why do you think they were so unsure about making a full on movie with it for quite some time? They know not to fuck it up.
 

Aureliano

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I still don't understand where people get this idea of 'making' money from. The only people who make money are people with special paper, ink and printers. It's not like making a sweater. Companies TAKE money. From other people. If companies were willing to say, "You know, sometimes we just have to take more of your money than we were before for the same or less product," I might have something resembling sympathy for their position. At least they'd be honest.
 

shrekfan246

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May 26, 2011
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Gearhead mk2 said:
Ashoten said:
This is why I am a PC gamer and Steam is my friend.
Yeah, Steam isn't exactly immune either. But I don't think anyone here is going to listen to my argument. I dared to suggest that Steam wasn't the second coming of Christ, so I'll most likely get burned to a crisp now.
Note: I hardly ever use Steam if I can help it.

There's a slight difference between advertising free items for Team Fortress 2 (itself now a free-to-play game) alongside preordering other games, and having Mountain Dew sponsor your marketing campaigns.

OT: Good video, Jim, and agreed like usual. It's funny how the companies complaining most often about needing to make money are the ones who make record-breaking sales every year. You know, funny in that "what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-the-world" sort of way.