r/technology
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u/chrisdh79
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Dec 01 '22
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U.S. Army Planned to Pay Streamers Millions to Reach Gen-Z Through Call of Duty | Internal Army documents obtained by Motherboard provide insight on how the Army wanted to reach Gen-Z, women, and Black and Hispanic people through Twitch, Paramount+, and the WWE. Society
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake884/us-army-pay-streamers-millions-call-of-duty3.4k
u/ilovesharkpeople Dec 01 '22
Well, yeah. They US military has literally made games in the past with the America's Army series. And the biggest blockbuster of the year, top gun, was also a giant recruitment ad for the navy. They're not exactly being subtle about this.
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u/Dangerous_Brief Dec 01 '22
and FOOTBALL
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u/Globalist2 Dec 02 '22
Yup, every "patriotic display" you see at halftime is a paid promotion for Uncle Sam. Wasn't a thing until after 9/11
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u/Frigidevil Dec 02 '22
Yep, the government pays teams a helfty sum to teams to do those military flyovers. Propaganda works
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u/Goldie1822 Dec 01 '22
I’m like “why is this news”
US Army esports has been around for like 3 years and they’re active on Reddit.
They commissioned two video games: “America’s Army” and “Americas Army 2”
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u/DebentureThyme Dec 01 '22
Yeah, it's not like some secret initiative. They have a marketing and advertising budget as part of their recruitment program. If they didn't, they'd never meet required numbers to maintain force levels.
Even if someone is against having such a large standing military, then get Congress to slash their budget and lower expected force numbers. As is, they're just meeting quotas they're expected to meet, nothing insidious about that.
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u/Mezmorizor Dec 01 '22
I'm shocked at how far down this is. The US military advertises and other things everybody who has even slightly paid attention to their life already knows at 10.
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u/riplikash Dec 01 '22
"News" doesn't mean "unexpected". Expected things are still news when they happen.
The only reason you know the military advertises like this is because it's reported as news. As it should be.
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u/lickedTators Dec 01 '22
They recruit subliminally, liminally, and superliminally.
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u/davidds0
Dec 01 '22
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They gonna be real disappointed when they find out about the really long queue times, no aim assist, no skins, and the battle passes just give you ptsd
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u/gcruzatto Dec 01 '22 •
Achievement unlocked: I Hate Fireworks!
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u/zhaoz Dec 01 '22
Dont forget the hearing damage!
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u/public_enemy_obi_wan Dec 01 '22
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
For the rest of your life.
So annoying.
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u/tipthetrashman Dec 01 '22
Every single person I know who has worked in an engine room on a navy ship has tinnitus. Hearing conservation programs only work if you follow them, yall. Don’t wanna hear the “whine” for the rest of your life, trust me.
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u/public_enemy_obi_wan Dec 01 '22
Mine is due to a TBI. Earplugs don't project your brain racket balling around in your skull.
I do agree with your point though.
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u/Matasa89 Dec 01 '22
Don’t forget permadeath!
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u/ImBoredToo Dec 01 '22
Roguelikes and depression are all the rage these days. That's a bonus.
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u/roboninja Dec 01 '22
Roguelikes have meta progression. Do you believe in reincarnation?
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u/correcthorsestapler Dec 01 '22
Reminds me of an Onion video from 2009: Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks
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u/CalvinDehaze Dec 01 '22
“Press X to fill out paperwork.”
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u/mrizzerdly Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
https://youtu.be/yuTkgi7scKo Onion News Network
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u/PerezosoRapido Dec 01 '22
Wait till they find out where they respawn.
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u/ShiningInTheLight Dec 01 '22
Or that trying to throw a knife to kill a guy 40 feet away is just going to get you smoked.
Also, you can't hop around and skip through windows when you've got an 80+ pound combat load.
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u/runtheplacered Dec 01 '22
I at least get to call in an air strike when I kill enough people, right?
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u/KilledTheCar Dec 01 '22
Yeah but you're gonna call it in when you're taking fire because you vastly overestimate enemy presence on a ridge, and then you'll get your ass reamed for requesting a fucking JDAM on three guys and an old Toyota pickup.
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u/kimchifreeze Dec 01 '22
They are actually adding aim assist. Check NGSW-FC. Basically computers on your guns to help you do shooting calculations.
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u/Kangar Dec 01 '22
"How do you do, fellow soldiers!"
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u/tallandlanky Dec 01 '22
Not well. Trying to enlist in the Army but I need a medical waiver. Won't hear back from them for at least 3 weeks or up to 3 months. Joy. At the very least I get to go back to my crap job that doesn't pay enough to survive for the time being.
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u/itsdefinitely2021 Dec 01 '22
The military has seen FPS video games as a advertising platform for 20 years.
Every time you spin your army-man barbie doll in your loadout screen or practice 'comms' with your buds you're playing around with good old homegrown outreach initiatives.
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u/Youvebeeneloned Dec 01 '22
Yep Americas Army is a thing... it used to be actually better than the original Counter-Strike when it was released around the same time.
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u/sirboddingtons Dec 01 '22
America's Army was actually an incredible game purely from a game play standpoint. It was really refined and well run, like impressively so. Lots of memories on AA. Used to run a 50 person clan.
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u/bedake Dec 01 '22
This game was great, had so many small details I've never seen before like gun jams requiring you to manually clear the jam, or the basic training that taught you game controls... During marksmanship you could shoot the drill instructor and then the game fades to black and you wake up in Leavenworth prison lmao
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u/li_314 Dec 01 '22
That's pretty funny. Was it higher budget than other FPS at the time?
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u/pedantic_cheesewheel Dec 01 '22
It was made by the Pentagon as a recruiting tool while its next competitor was a mod for Half Life that Valve hired the two guys sooooo, yeah.
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u/bedake Dec 01 '22
I'm not sure if it's fair to call counter strike a competitor, CS was more a competitor to something like Quake or Unreal in my opinion due to the arcadey nature. I think Battlefield 1942 was a fair competitor, a triple A title focused on a battlefield experience, yet did not use iron sights at the time, and even then was still kind of in a separate class focusing on different goals. AA really did not have any true competitors and kinda stood alone in it's hyper realism gameplay. The first COD kinda touched on it with the ability to lean around corners but still had more of a Deathmatch feel without serious objective based gameplay like AA did, maybe it had like capture the flag or king of the hill, i kinda don't remember.
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u/SGT_Apone Dec 01 '22
It was higher than it was originally supposed to be. Funny story (was a dev on this game), the budget they were awarded from the Pentagon for The Army Game Project included a pretty high dollar amount for licensing a game engine. The original budget plan (in '99/'00) was to license Valve's upcoming new 'Source' engine for this project. I can't remember the exact numbers but something like 1-2 million budgeted/awarded for engine licensing.
Well, the Source engine wasn't ready in time for AA dev to go into full production (in 2001). It was delayed and (as we know now) wasn't available until 2004 when Half-Life 2 released. However, Epic games was working on it's second iteration of a game engine (Unreal Engine 2) and the Army licensed that engine instead for significantly less than they had budgeted for Source (i think like ~300k?). So the Army Game project had quite of bit of extra money already allocated to it to spend on the project.
Thus, they were able to hire more experieced game devs, better dev tools, and a bigger team. Ultimately, it's probably why the game was so much better than people expected. The original America's Army 1.0 was the first game released using the new Unreal Engine 2 (even before an Epic game).
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u/bedake Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
Not sure, I'd say the budget was likely comparable to other AAA titles of the time but really, it was one of the first games i am aware of that really focused on realism as opposed to an arcadey experience. Movement in the game was slow and intentional, you had to use smoke to cover your movement, lean around corners, use suppresive fire, it had a mechanic that blurred vision when being shot at... It was one of the first to use iron sights and limit how many players could select classes like marksman per squad. You had a fixed number of magazines and reloading a partially empty magazine didn't just magically fill it back up, you ended up with a half empty magazine haha... Literally never saw this again until Tarkov came out.
We take all this stuff for granted now but they did all this in 2002, nobody but them at the time pulled all of this into a single game.
The closest game experience to America's Army I'd say was the Red Orchestra series.
Now there's lots trying to do what they did, at a bigger scale, games like Hell Let Loose, Squad, Insurgency, Rising Storm, Post Scriptum in my opinion all owe themselves and are part of the groundwork and lineage set by America's Army... Hell even the pacing and controls of PuBG are reminiscent
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u/WalterPecky Dec 01 '22
I liked how you had to complete the boot camp levels before getting access to multiplayer.
It took a couple hours for me as a kid to even complete the boot camp.
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u/RoyAwesome Dec 01 '22
They made you go through a virtual first aid course to unlock medic. It was pretty funny
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u/sirboddingtons Dec 01 '22
I actually remember hearing a while back that someone used the medic training from AA to actually save someone's life. They were able to put them in a recovery position and apply a simple tourniquet from some massive trauma.
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u/Fixhotep Dec 01 '22
to this day, AA had the best collection of maps of any FPS ever made.
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u/AlexHimself Dec 01 '22
Why do you suppose that is?
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u/Fixhotep Dec 01 '22
they werent afraid to do asymmetrical maps with asymmetrical gameplay in a time no one else would.
Mountain Pass, Insurgent Camp, Bridge, Pipeline. Mountain Pass is a ridiculous map and would never be made in todays market outside of mods.
So it was how well the maps were designed to compliment the style of gameplay they wanted.
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u/pedantic_cheesewheel Dec 01 '22
I always hated how the trend in CS started to be towards “balanced” maps and how that was apparently what everyone wanted. Having 1-2 balanced maps is fine but the asymmetry of Train and Inferno pushed new things to constantly be tried and resulted in the greatest pro matches possible. (Nuke is the example of bad asymmetry at least in CSGO so it’s not always perfect.)
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u/AugmentedDragon Dec 01 '22
I actually really liked the unbalanced maps, the ones that were heavily CT sided or the other way around, like cbble or aztec. it meant that to win the match, you actually had to be better because even if you started off with the advantage, you'd still need to win a few rounds from the other side, meaning you couldn't just coast to victory. and if you started off with the disadvantage, as long as you won a couple of rounds, you weren't completely out because you could rely on the second half to give you a boost.
while I love dust 2, it's an iconic map, it's almost too balanced, which is good in some ways but also makes it where you don't really have to change strategy much between playing T and CT. there's nothing like drop-down in cbble or popdog in train, places where stuff like shotguns can do real damage. it's all about holding long angles with an awp or going for mid range shots with the M4/AK, which can lead to very boring and very repetitive matches
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u/Shadowmant Dec 01 '22
Loved the map where you landed via parachutes in the farmers field and had to assault the farm.
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u/lilnomad Dec 01 '22
Bridge goes down as one of the most iconic maps for me in gaming history
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u/Mister_Hangman Dec 01 '22
And the gameplay was punishing. Unlike cod.
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u/Gifted_dingaling Dec 01 '22
Today “whaaaa he killed me with 14 bullets instead of 25!!!! The TTK is too low”
Red orchestra and AA players “lol I got shot from somewhere once and died…”
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u/Wanna_grenade Dec 01 '22
Bridges still gives me PTSD to this day
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u/Ducimus Dec 01 '22
Loved that map with the 249. Blind fire into the fog, kill half the enemy team.
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u/arripit_auras Dec 01 '22
my clan could call enemy positions at the various numbered pillars and cover positions in Bridge and we could all do blind shots through the fog
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u/Mothringer Dec 01 '22
It was a surprisingly good game. Much better than any other attempt at digital outreach the government had made at the time.
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u/Aimhere2k Dec 01 '22
I'm surprised that the Army didn't make AA open-source when they shut it down, or at least sell it, so someone else could pick it up and run it. New management would get a ready-made game with an established player base, Army would still get the recruitment goodwill.
Only trouble is, the new management would eventually introduce micro transactions and loot boxes and other fun RMT, because gamers really love that stuff, you know?
I can just picture it... you spend $5 to "requisition" better toilet paper for your soldier, or else your soldier will go into battles distracted by an uncomfortable butt, have crappier aim (literally), and lose.
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u/alowsedan Dec 01 '22
If you're referring to the original, it is now run by the community. https://aao25.com/
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u/gankdotin
Dec 01 '22
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yvan eht nioj
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u/bukbukbuklao Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
I don’t know why but I got the sudden urge to join the navy.
Yvan eht nioj everyone!
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u/HeadTransportation95 Dec 01 '22
the Army ordered a stop of all spending with Call of Duty’s publisher Activision after the company faced a wave of sexual harrassment complaints.
I find this ironic, since sexual violence is so prevalent in the armed forces that it has its own category (military sexual assault).
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u/KrabbyPattyCereal
Dec 01 '22
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Look how cool this video game is? Do you want to enlist and sweep floors and get PTSD?
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u/anti-torque Dec 01 '22
On the plus side, I can now apply to any commercial floor waxing service and know what the hell I'm talking about.
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u/Matasa89 Dec 01 '22
Man, combat vets should consider starting a commercial cleaning service, they have all that training.
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u/Youvebeeneloned Dec 01 '22
They did EXACTLY THIS after 9/11. Look up Americas Army. It was literally a Counter-Strike clone for PC and Mac that actually had some audience that was based on a real internal Army training tool that they then gamified to suck kids in.
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u/wigglin_harry Dec 01 '22
Sad thing is it was a pretty great game, I don't think it's fair to call it a counter strike clone though,it teminded me more of ARMA, but my memory is a little cloudy, it was a long ass time ago
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u/filthyrake Dec 01 '22
Americas army was really really good for its time. When it came out, my HS game club abandoned all our other FPS games for it (well that and the aliens vs predator game) for a long time. It was just better.
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u/mejelic Dec 01 '22
Omg, AVP was amazing.
My only complaint is that there were 2 human teams. They should have merged them for 1v1v1 action.
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u/Tinctorus Dec 01 '22
Yup I watched a whole documentary on this and the armed forces involvement in e-sports
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u/Practical_Gas8750
Dec 01 '22
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I find nothing surprising about this. Do we forget the ads all over reddit?
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u/AtomKanister Dec 01 '22
Wait. Reddit has ads?
laughs in old.reddit.com and adblock
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u/NoticedGenie66 Dec 01 '22
Lots of regular posts are ads, they're just not overt. "Look at this cool thing I have!"; "TIL this service has been used by multiple generations and it is effective"; "This is a funny thing I can do with product" are all likely ads. Even if they aren't, they get people talking about a product or service where they otherwise would not. People in this thread are pretty easily talking positively about America's Army (game) and it has been many years since it was at its most popular. Imagine now that same logic applied to a present-day product/service. It takes one popular post/comment to spawn a whole chain of discussion, and it is infinitely cheaper than overt ads which people want to skip/gloss over anyway.
The ads aren't gone, they're smarter.
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u/Kong_Kjell_XVI Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 02 '22 •
A typical covert ad on reddit usually involves at least three separate accounts, sometimes more all being run by the same person or ad agency. They're easy to spot if you know what to look for.
The first account is Oliver the OP. Oliver just posts images or videos that just so happen to include the product they're trying to sell, but Oliver never actually comments on his own threads he just replies to defaults a couple of times a week to make his account look legit so he can post covert ads.
Then there's Curious Cathy. Not much to say about her, all she wants is to know what the product in the image/video is and where to find it.
Next is Helpful Howard. Howard always has an amazon link ready in the chamber, usually posted within 5-10 minutes of Cathy's request.Often there's a Reviewer Randy. Randy always replies to Howard saying how he recently bought [thing] and loved it. Low quality t-shirt with print, made in China? Randy loves it.
Wrist bands from Wish? Randy bought 200 of them and gave them out to his friends, family, distant relatives, their pets, the whole god damn neighborhood and his insurance agent and everyone loved them.And lastly there's Bert the Bot in the comments. You're never really sure if Bert has a pulse or if he's in a persistent vegetative state, but he always leaves inane low effort comments in Oliver threads and never seems to reply to anybody. Bert's posts are short, single sentences rife with spelling errors or autocorrected words and so generic sounding that they could apply to almost any situation. Bert comments all have the same low effort, barely-conscious-feel to them.
The next time you visit a generic meme sub you might start to spot Olivers, Cathys and Howards everywhere. This site is infested with astroturfed ads if you know what to look for, you just don't seem to notice them because someone out there disguised their ad to get past your defenses while you're scrolling through reddit on the can.
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u/wheatsicklebird Dec 02 '22
yeah this is why /hailcorporate is useful despite the fact that posing a hailcorporate link will quickly get you blacklisted from default subs
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u/fwango Dec 02 '22
wait, why does it get you banned from default subs? do default sub mods not like it when people point out astroturfing?
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u/Musaks Dec 02 '22
yeah, fully agree /hailcorporate is the best
i bought 200 from them last week, passed them out to my family, friends, at work and the neighbourhood and everybody loved them
5of5stars, would buy again
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u/MurderIsRelevant Dec 01 '22
I'm just waiting for the COD mission where you tasked to do every day boring ass shit the military does, and then you magically have to fight to defend the base.
Sweeping, motor pool Monday's. Piss test. Morning PT. Getting chewed out for something ridiculous or out of your control. You will see tears sliding underneath the seal on that VR headset as I quiveringly say "this is so real" (Sniffle)
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u/Awanderinglolplayer Dec 01 '22
The Air Force already runs a ton of adds during CSGO tournaments. This is nothing new.
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u/i_take_no_bologna Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
I saw a tweet thread a while back about sone heads of the COD team are Ex gov security people
https://twitter.com/alanrmacleod/status/1593709638708613123?s=46&t=IyFPSuLtecP77Y4PmDJcGg
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u/GetRichOrDieTryinnn Dec 01 '22
Didnt the simpsons do an episode on this many years ago?
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u/donDragonc Dec 01 '22
Literally all they needed to do is to raise the salaries. Like that’s it.
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u/Arsenault185 Dec 01 '22
When you break the numbers down, its actually, pretty decent.
Full blown health care. No copays, caps, or!Limitations. includes dental and vision.
Base pay that is guaranteed to go up over time, along with inflation adjustments. Promotion systems that for all intents and purposes, YOU control. Free food and housing.
If you're married, a housing and food stipend that's not taxible.
30 days paid vacation a year.
All available to a high school grad with non experience.
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u/SuperSecretAgentMan Dec 01 '22
This isn't news. The military has done this for literally decades and has an entire department dedicated to advertising and outreach. They've always used sneaky 'hello fellow kids' advertising to acquire fresh meat‐ er, recruits.
Ever play the game America's Army?
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u/ObamasBoss Dec 01 '22
The Blue Angels are nothing more than an advertising wing to drive recruitment. If it didnt work they wouldnt do it. The ride alongs they give are based on who they think would give the most publicity.
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u/SenorPuff Dec 01 '22
Aerobatics teams have other purposes than just recruitment and advertising, but yeah, they do their stuff publicly rather than just for the other reasons, because it's also useful for recruiting and advertising.
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u/WackyBones510 Dec 01 '22
It’s frankly way more above board and transparent than private sector marketing.
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u/jtmarshiii Dec 01 '22
BILLIONS are paid to the NFL and MLB so that they can pretend to be patriotic! All the flag stuff on the field, all the camo uniforms, all the recognition of this servicemenber... all is profit for sports... they don't give two shits. Reason you don't see this at NHL or other leagues because the DOD hasn't given them money!!!
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u/PackageintheMaleBox Dec 01 '22
Were paid. Thanks to that report coming out the spending was cut. Still got Top Gun Maverick though.
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u/EfficientTitle9779 Dec 01 '22
The headline should just be: Army now using modern advertising tactics.
Like they’ve always gone after the younger demographic and this is the easiest way to advertise to them in 2022 it’s not rocket science.
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u/AlSweigart Dec 01 '22
Press "F" to not get your enlistment bonus because the recruiter lied to you. Also, your knee and ankles are fucked up for the rest of your life.
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u/neo101b Dec 01 '22
I member the USA army video game, I also saw the video game cabinet in a UK shopping centre which was weird.
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u/ExpiredBanana Dec 01 '22
This isn't really anything new, but god damn the military would do literally anything to boost recruitment rather than addressing any of the core issues contributing to high attrition rates and extremely poor retention.
Awful lower enlisted standard of living
Low pay. Enlisted w/ family sometimes have to rely on food stamps and food banks to eat
Toxic leadership
Terrible veteran health services
Inconsistent working hours
Workplace harassment
This is by no means a comprehensive list. These core issues usually branch off to countless others. As long as these issues are ignored, attrition will still rise and recruitment will continue to fall. With the internet and social media, gone are the days of pushing these problems under the rug.
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u/wtfTooma Dec 01 '22 •
Join the army, get an exclusive weapon skin!