Probably no person who follows even a modicum of the even slightly popular YouTube channels has been spared from a sponsored advertisement by the channel creator about the mobile phone game "RAID: Shadow Legends". It's so widespread and so ubiquitous that it has essentially become a joke and a source of memes.
For some reason the developers of this game in particular seem to be throwing literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even literally millions of dollars, into an absolutely massive advertising campaign consisting mostly of offering sponsorship deals with hundreds and hundreds of YouTube channels. And many of these creators have agreed to it.
And why not. It's easy money. Regardless of all the non-disclosure agreement mumbo-jumbo (that inevitably comes as a matter of course with such sponsorship deals), unsurprisingly the details of these agreements have been leaked several times, so we know pretty much all the details. The payment that the youtuber gets from a 30-second spiel is in the ballpark of 1300-1500 US dollars. This is not a meager sum, as it certainly helps paying several months of rent, and may well be equal to the monthly income that many of these youtubers get from YouTube (and with some of them it may well be quite significantly more). A rather lucrative deal for a 30-second speech in a few videos.
I have no problems with such sponsorship deals. They don't make the youtuber a sellout. They are quite normal, and happen all the time. As long as it's clearly disclosed as a sponsored speech, that's just fine (it might be bothersome, annoying and boring, but it's fine, especially since it's easily skippable).
What I do have a problem with is that especially this particular one pretty much demands the youtubers to lie to their viewers. Not only is the advertisement speech highly scripted (closely following detailed instructions given by the game developers), but it's deceptive and full of lies. And I don't mean "lies" in the sense of the advertisement making claims about the game itself that are untrue or misleading (although there arguably is a bit of that too), but that these youtubers are almost invariably instructed to lie to their audience about they themselves playing the game, how much they have played it, and how much they like it, often going into rather specific details.
In the vast majority of cases (perhaps all of them) these claims are just not true. The vast majority of these youtubers have never even tried the game, or even if they have, they haven't played it even nearly as much as they claim, nor have done any of the things in the game that they claim. All these claims are scripted, instructed in detail by the game developers in their sponsorship deal, which the youtuber agrees to. All the footage they show is not of their own gameplay, but also specifically instructed by the agreement. (Several leaked agreements show this in quite detail.)
Getting a sponsorship deal is fine. However, deliberately and obnoxiously lying to your viewers is not. That makes you a dishonest sellout. A person with a strong sense of morality would never accept a deal where he is demanded to lie to his audience, especially about his own experience with the product (because in this situation he cannot even feign ignorance, ie. having been misled with false information, as he is making claims about what he himself has done.)
Of course this is not, by far, the worst example of deceptive aggressive marketing of "freemium" mobile games. There are far worse examples.
In one rather infamous case some years ago, with another mobile game, the youtubers and streamers were actually forbidden by the sponsorship deal contract from disclosing to their audience that it was indeed a paid sponsorship, and instead they were instructed to deceive their audience by pretending to play the game, while merely playing back video footage sent to them by the developers, while commenting on this pretend-playing with completely scripted lines, as if they were genuine on-the-fly comments, rather than acted scripted lines.
This became quite quickly obvious when different streamers were shown to "play" the exact same footage, repeating pretty much the exact same scripted lines. None of them disclosed to their audience that the gameplay was not real-time, nor that their "reaction" to it was scripted and acted.
That is not only being a sellout, but in many jurisdictions it's actually illegal (because it's a form of fraud and false advertisement).
These are especially obnoxious in that quite often a big portion of the audience of these youtubers and streamers is quite young, and these games are notorious for being the worst kind of so-called "freemium" games, ie. "free to play" with in-app purchases, which have been specifically designed to induce people to spend as much money as possible on them (often by making the games really addictive, especially for younger people, but very crippled if you don't spend any money on them). These are exactly the type of games that are "free to play" but where addicted people end up spending hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars/euros (much, much more than your typical single-purchase triple-A game).
As always, the law in most countries is really slow to react to these deceptive marketing tactics.
For some reason the developers of this game in particular seem to be throwing literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even literally millions of dollars, into an absolutely massive advertising campaign consisting mostly of offering sponsorship deals with hundreds and hundreds of YouTube channels. And many of these creators have agreed to it.
And why not. It's easy money. Regardless of all the non-disclosure agreement mumbo-jumbo (that inevitably comes as a matter of course with such sponsorship deals), unsurprisingly the details of these agreements have been leaked several times, so we know pretty much all the details. The payment that the youtuber gets from a 30-second spiel is in the ballpark of 1300-1500 US dollars. This is not a meager sum, as it certainly helps paying several months of rent, and may well be equal to the monthly income that many of these youtubers get from YouTube (and with some of them it may well be quite significantly more). A rather lucrative deal for a 30-second speech in a few videos.
I have no problems with such sponsorship deals. They don't make the youtuber a sellout. They are quite normal, and happen all the time. As long as it's clearly disclosed as a sponsored speech, that's just fine (it might be bothersome, annoying and boring, but it's fine, especially since it's easily skippable).
What I do have a problem with is that especially this particular one pretty much demands the youtubers to lie to their viewers. Not only is the advertisement speech highly scripted (closely following detailed instructions given by the game developers), but it's deceptive and full of lies. And I don't mean "lies" in the sense of the advertisement making claims about the game itself that are untrue or misleading (although there arguably is a bit of that too), but that these youtubers are almost invariably instructed to lie to their audience about they themselves playing the game, how much they have played it, and how much they like it, often going into rather specific details.
In the vast majority of cases (perhaps all of them) these claims are just not true. The vast majority of these youtubers have never even tried the game, or even if they have, they haven't played it even nearly as much as they claim, nor have done any of the things in the game that they claim. All these claims are scripted, instructed in detail by the game developers in their sponsorship deal, which the youtuber agrees to. All the footage they show is not of their own gameplay, but also specifically instructed by the agreement. (Several leaked agreements show this in quite detail.)
Getting a sponsorship deal is fine. However, deliberately and obnoxiously lying to your viewers is not. That makes you a dishonest sellout. A person with a strong sense of morality would never accept a deal where he is demanded to lie to his audience, especially about his own experience with the product (because in this situation he cannot even feign ignorance, ie. having been misled with false information, as he is making claims about what he himself has done.)
Of course this is not, by far, the worst example of deceptive aggressive marketing of "freemium" mobile games. There are far worse examples.
In one rather infamous case some years ago, with another mobile game, the youtubers and streamers were actually forbidden by the sponsorship deal contract from disclosing to their audience that it was indeed a paid sponsorship, and instead they were instructed to deceive their audience by pretending to play the game, while merely playing back video footage sent to them by the developers, while commenting on this pretend-playing with completely scripted lines, as if they were genuine on-the-fly comments, rather than acted scripted lines.
This became quite quickly obvious when different streamers were shown to "play" the exact same footage, repeating pretty much the exact same scripted lines. None of them disclosed to their audience that the gameplay was not real-time, nor that their "reaction" to it was scripted and acted.
That is not only being a sellout, but in many jurisdictions it's actually illegal (because it's a form of fraud and false advertisement).
These are especially obnoxious in that quite often a big portion of the audience of these youtubers and streamers is quite young, and these games are notorious for being the worst kind of so-called "freemium" games, ie. "free to play" with in-app purchases, which have been specifically designed to induce people to spend as much money as possible on them (often by making the games really addictive, especially for younger people, but very crippled if you don't spend any money on them). These are exactly the type of games that are "free to play" but where addicted people end up spending hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars/euros (much, much more than your typical single-purchase triple-A game).
As always, the law in most countries is really slow to react to these deceptive marketing tactics.
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