Just your average dude. My interests include video games, coffee, and cats. Despite this people seem to think I’m interesting.
I’d say the situation is unfair to all parties involved. No matter what someone loses. If the viewer watches the ad, the ad buyer does not receive a return on investment. If the viewer blocks the ad, the content creator is not compensated. If the viewer choses to not watch videos at all, they miss out on whatever benefits the video would have provided.
The problem with that is lost time. It’s not much, but it can be a bit of a headache especially on things like repair videos.
The question becomes, how does someone that does not have any disposable income support creators they like without inundating themselves with ads for products they are unable to afford?
What I typically do is listen to some music. I have a collection of soundtracks from some of my favorite video games. I pick a couple of pieces from the whole collection and let the music lead me through my memories. It’s not too far off from the feeling of going through an old photo album. I imagine one could get a similar effect by returning to any number of things that they used to enjoy.
On my PC I have 8TBs split across various SSDs (both NVMe and SATA). All of them have games folders. My Switch has 64GB of internal storage and a 512GB microSD card, though I do have a 1TB card ready to go. Just haven’t taken the afternoon to pop it in and redownload my games yet. My PS4 is sitting stock with it’s 500GB internal drive. My Wii U has a 2TB external HDD hooked up to it (I was very optimistic about its potential library). The PC has over 2TB of just games on it. To be frank, it could very easily have a full TB more. But I don’t feel like hunting down all the various launchers’ folders at the moment. Honestly this is largely data hoarding. I only play a few of the games regularly. I keep telling myself I’ll get to dealing with my backlog eventually, but I never seem to find the time for it. The Switch is nearly full, I could fit maybe two more retail games on it. Mercifully Switch games are still pretty small as a rule, I have a library of about 80 games installed on it. Once again this is a case of data hoarding. The majority of the games are ones I have either beaten or played my fill of. I just keep them installed for no particular reason. The PS4 stores more dust than games nowadays, but if I recall I had five games downloaded and they used up somewhere between 300 and 400GB. I’ve honestly considered selling the thing, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy it given its condition. The Wii U, as you might imagine, has vast quantities of space available. Still, I somehow managed to use up a bit over 100GB on the external drive. The largest game I have installed on it is Breath of the Wild at 19GB.