Can't wait until next gen when a constant online connection is required, license keys lock copies of games to individual consoles/user accounts, dynamic ads appear like VH1's old "Pop-Up Video" show throughout the game, and every publisher has a separate pay service for multiplayer. I'll save a ton of money!
Yeah, I'll probably just be buying indie games and reading dead-tree books at that point. Jesus.
If they have a brain in their heads, the sales and marketing pukes who are responsible for these loading screen atrocities will settle on aping whatever Hollywood does for product placement.
Sure, there are ads front-loaded on DVDs; the first cheap home videos like
Top Gun and
Batman were made excusably cheap by putting ads at the opening. These were ads using the imagery of the movie which was about to play, so there was arguably some tie-in.
Even without those, there are always a ton of previews for other movies; we generally don't mind them because, hey, we all like movie trailers, and the ones on DVDs are almost always cherry picked to be similar to the movie you're about to watch. But those are ads, too. They're just not out of place or unwelcome.
