Ads in games are not the problem. The seams are.

Ads are coming to games, and the argument about them is stuck on the wrong question. On this week's Player Driven Live, Greg Posner and games-industry analyst Colan Neese were joined by Richard Goldsmith, a former game designer and longtime industry consultant now working in robotics. The hour ranged from Ubisoft to GoldenEye to GTA 6, and it kept landing on the same finding: every business model on the table already works. Ads work. Subscriptions work. Casual games work. Short clips work. What kills them is the seam somebody bolts on at the edge.

The cardinal sin is not the ad, it is the ad plus the price

Neese's frame came from cable, and it is the sharpest thing in the episode. Customers are willing to pay with their time, or pay to avoid the ads. The business that forgets that is the one that tries to charge for both at once.

That is exactly what cable did. Carriage fees climbed, Disney pushed a two-dollar Disney Junior 3 onto packages that only wanted ESPN, and the ad breaks got longer at the same time. Netflix walked in at seven dollars a month with no ads and content on demand, and the model crumbled on itself. The pendulum has since swung back: Netflix growth has flattened to roughly 2%, it now names YouTube as its competition, and the bundle is quietly reassembling around an ad tier and a pay-to-skip tier.

So the tell for games is not whether ads arrive. It is whether anyone raises the box price in the same quarter they raise the ad load.

Ads have an obvious home, and it is not the boss battle

The other half of the fear is placement, and Neese drew a line most of the discourse misses. Platform and content are different businesses. What Xbox does when Game Pass boots is Xbox's call. How many billboards EA puts in its next Star Wars game is EA's call. Players who meet a Star Wars game brought to you by Old Spice will blame the platform, and they will be blaming the wrong company.

Goldsmith's bet is that the platform version looks boring, which is the point. A pre-roll block when you boot Game Pass or switch titles, roughly what Amazon Prime Video already runs before a movie. The nightmare version, where you pause and get an ad or the boss battle arrives sponsored, is the one everyone is arguing about and the least likely to ship.

The 85% problem is why any of this is happening

Underneath the ads conversation sits a number Neese keeps returning to, drawn from his own company's data: roughly 85% of player attention is captured by games that are two or more years old. If the only monetization event in that game's life was a seventy-dollar purchase, then all of that attention is inventory the publisher already gave away.

That is the pressure. Ads open a revenue line that does not come out of the player's wallet, which is how television funded itself for half a century. On mobile the math is blunter still. A studio can hand Apple 30% of an in-app purchase, or hand over nothing at all by running ads instead, and Neese's read is that the widely-shared charts showing mobile revenue in decline are missing the ad line entirely. It also reframes Xbox's stated ambition to be in front of a billion users, a number that never survives console math but makes sense the moment the target is smart TVs, mobile, and an ad-supported archive.

Netflix does not have a games problem, it has a funnel

The Netflix segment is where the through-line got its cleanest test. Netflix is running short-form video now, chasing engagement after growth flattened, and both guests read the games push the same way. The games are fine. The road to them is not.

The original version asked players to open Netflix, discover that games existed, leave for the App Store, and link an account. As Neese put it, if you know anything about mobile user acquisition, that is already a nightmare. The current version asks them to download a separate controller app and scan a QR code. Posner pushed back that none of this is actually hard, and that a push notification would solve it. Goldsmith's answer is the line worth keeping.

The counter-model was sitting right there. Samsung's Gaming Hub lives on the TV the player is already looking at, takes a Bluetooth controller or a phone, dealer's choice, and asks for nothing else. Same games, one less seam.

The metric on the board will kill the product you needed

The best story in the episode is Neese's, from his years at Twitch. Twitch had clips, and clips were stackable short video that reliably pulled interest toward streamers on other platforms. Stack them back to back and the signal compounds. It was, functionally, the format TikTok would go on to own.

Nobody made a bad call about the product. They made a correct call against the wrong measurement, which is the more expensive mistake and the harder one to see coming. Every operator reading this has a number on a board that is quietly making the same decision for them.

Game Pass does not have an IP problem, it has a length problem

The sharpest operator insight landed almost in passing. Goldsmith named id Software as probably the studio most damaged by Game Pass, because a new Doom would otherwise have been a must-buy for the players who grew up on it. Neese's version: putting Oblivion on the service for free was lighting something like twenty million dollars of sales on fire.

But Goldsmith's nuance is the part worth stealing. The problem is not premium IP on a subscription. It is premium IP that runs a hundred hours or more. Nobody samples a hundred-hour game. It locks a player in, and while they are locked in they are not experimenting or discovering anything else in the catalog. A service whose best content is also its longest content is quietly starving its own discovery engine.

And the GTA 6 number nobody should repeat

The last stretch turned to GTA 6, where the warning was about expectations rather than the game. The forty-million-copies figures making the rounds are, in Neese's words, make-believe numbers, and Strauss Zelnick spent the spring tempering the street for exactly this reason. If the expectation is a hundred million on day one, nothing can meet it. If the question is whether this becomes a decade-long game that makes Take-Two billions, the answer is obviously yes.

His market call is the contrarian one. GTA 6 does not come for Roblox. Roblox is full of children, it is hard to monetize, and it will keep doing what it does until it manages to age its audience up. Fortnite is the in-between game, and its young-adult players are the ones GTA actually eats. Goldsmith's read on investors sums the segment up: they wildly overestimate how much money a game will make, and wildly underestimate how lucrative it will be long term.

Watch, and bring your take

Player Driven Live runs Thursdays, breaking down the business behind the games. There is no show next week, with Neese at Comic Con and Posner at a conference, so the show returns the week after.

Before that, Player Driven is hosting its Games for Change side event in New York on Tuesday July 21.

Get the argument in your inbox first with The Operator's Briefing.

Then bring your own read to the debate in the Player Driven Discord.