First descendants AI-generated ads are all wrong with video game marketing

First descendant developer Nexon has been accused of creating ads for online shooters that can be played for free using the generator AI, which makes players extremely upset. One Reddit commenter said, “If you saw these ads before playing the game, the game was 1, fake, 2. I think it was some sort of scam, virus, or phishing attempt.” It was an existing fan.

All ads are fake, but this is a whole new level

These ads bring together the strangest and worst parts of the video game marketing ecosystem. The first layer is that these ads portray streamers talking about the game. Streamers typically employ sponsorships to promote their products on streams, which are direct marketing to potential consumers.

Such people are paid to say good things about a particular game. That's not necessarily their honest opinion. I found that the effect of this is working using Mindseye Streamers. This prevents one sponsored streamer from telling viewers where to buy the game after a disastrous stream of a very broken game. Another cancelled their sponsored stream for a few seconds before they were published.

Because this is so common, gaming companies sometimes hire actors to poss as streamers to promote the game. Stacey Henley, editor of Thegamer, wrote an excellent explanation that shows that this shows streamers no longer need to be famous to carry weight.

It's also oddly common for companies to edit clips of streamers who say they're playing completely different games and instead play the games.

The first descendants took this even further by hiring no actors, generating AI instead, adding a third-level fakery to these ads. Worse, one of the ADSs features what appears to be a real little creator named Danielthedemon.

This is probably unknown to Nexon, but it should be expected if the generative model used was trained on streamer footage. After all, generative models are notoriously problematic with copyright infringement and plagiarism, as they often generate images and videos that are very close to the material they trained.

How did you get to this point?

According to the original poster, anyone running the formula, the first descendant, Tiktok account, is well aware of the misfortunes surrounding the ads, removing comments and re-uploading the ads instead of dealing with the backlash.

While the guilt from Nexon has not been admitted yet, Nexon has its own AI research and development team, and the clips are clearly generated by AI. Instead, the company appears to be avoiding responsibility.

According to a post on the game's official Twitter account, the new season's marketing campaign includes the Creative Challenge program for Tiktok Creators.

Nexon “is now aware of situations surrounding the production of certain submitted videos where it may seem inappropriate,” and “is conducting a thorough joint investigation with Tiktok to determine the facts.” Nexon states, “All submitted videos have been verified through Tiktok's system to confirm copyright violations before they are approved as advertising content.”

Although ads generated by AI are not directly accepted, we can reasonably assume that this is what Nexon hints in this statement. Essentially, Nexon says that Tiktok has slipped through AI-generated content and that Nexon is not responsible. It is unclear whether Nexon needs to approve these videos before they can be used as advertisements, if external marketing companies are fine with their ads, or if Tiktok handles them all internally.

Anyway, what about this? Ads are, of course, ethical cans of worms, but they feel very glamour as ads and social media networks that deceive the game at so many levels to promote the means by which people can benefit from this slop. The fact that this happened at all is incredibly depressing and people are advertised as deserving better.