You, sir, have crossed the line.

This is an old post I wrote, which was originally posted on neverfear.org on Fri, 12th Sept 2008 22:07:38. Archived here for posterity.

I didn't really mind when The Escapist added the adverts at the end of the Zero Punctuation (archive.org link) videos. It was pretty unobtrusive, and advertised their own content. Fine.

Then "Yahtzee" changed the intro away from using appropriate, fair-use, copyrighted music, to a flashy-random-ZP-graphic title sequence. That annoyed me because I really liked the intro/outro songs (I can't think of Bioshock without thinking of The Beatles - Octopuses Garden..), and the new music/graphics are completely unfitting, and kind of boring..

Then there was adverts for Zero Punctuation at the end of Zero Punctuation. That was just stupid.

Now the video starts with a notice about the adverts at the end, then the actual adverts, which are longer than the content itself!

Without the the actual Zero Punctuation section, the video is about 6 minutes, 13seconds. The content itself is 4 minutes, 24 seconds!

There are two adverts (an ad for an escapist video, and a trailer), two escapist logos ("The Escapist Presents..", and the end image), the two-image t-shirt ad, and the "notice" image at the start. Fine if you have 25-45 minutes of content, not four..

I am absolutely not against advertising. Quite the opposite - I applaud companies that do advertising "well". The Escapist do no draw any such applause. More rocks. Metaphorical, pointy rocks.