New No Amount Of Money Can Buy Being Goated With The Sauce 2025

I miss the days when TV, movies and advertising were aware that videogames existed, but found them so impossible to understand that they represented them in only the most baffling of ways. A Doom 2 arcade cabinet; tightening up the graphics on level 3; "somebody's playing for real."

Those were the good times, it turns out, when other media couldn't yet latch onto some real but deeply embarrassing aspect of gaming culture in a desperate how-do-you-do-fellow-kids attempt to look cool. If you haven't watched the Amazon ad embedded above, steel yourself.

Not so long ago, a former vice president of Amazon gaming admitted that the company did such a bad job of competing against Steam, no one even realized it was trying to. Now the company is on to new strategies, like paying FaZe Clan co-owner Brian "FaZe Rug" Awadis to say "Alexa, I just crushed that round."

As part of a campaign to promote Alexa+, a supposedly improved version of the virtual assistant, Amazon has assembled a line-up of celebrities—Lil Wayne, Pete Davison, Rug—to have totally natural conversations with the disembodied robovoice in their empty, perfectly staged homes. The first two are famous enough that their presence immediately kicks the ads into celebrity mode, where we can innately understand that they're just being paid to inhabit their public personas while a brand throws itself at you. But the writing in Rug's ad and his profound lack of screen presence unfortunately makes us fully perceive the horrors of gaming's most terminally online vernacular.

It's almost impressive how ruthlessly the ad taints every gaming phrase it touches in under 30 seconds. There's the unconvincing "time to lock in" to kick things off; a Razzie-worthy "Let's goooo!" after some awkward analog stick flicking; and the requisite 'YouTuber plugs his casually rich lifestyle' by sending his fellow FaZe member 1,000 tissue boxes (who, incidentally, made a clearly contractually obliged comment on the ad's Instagram post, saying "imma need one of these").

Rug, who posts lowest common denominator YouTube dreck in the Mr Beast mold like "I bought the most expensive plane ticket! (Saudi Arabia)", has none of the rizz required to sell the line "This is a must cop" as he looks at a shopping cart full of tissue boxes on his phone. When Alexa reacts to his supposed win in an unseen shooter with "You are goated with the sauce, FaZe Rug," the ad ascends to the level of profound, enlightened anti-cool.

It's a staggering work

Source: PC Gamer