Is that seriously the only difference? You guys are doing all this complaining just because you don't want to support marketing shit? Do you realize you're playing games with folks who are a higher rank than you because they bought Doritos and Mountain Dew? If you're going to boycott a playlist for this reason you should have already boycotted the entire game.
The key difference for me is that if I don't want to see any of that Doritos marketing nonsense, I can safely ignore it because the game mentions it zero times ever. Meanwhile, there's a fat Virgin logo in the playlist preview picture for Infinity Slayer 2.0 Powered by Virgin Gaming and Ford, and there are Virgin logos plastering Waypoint, even going so far as to sponsor challenges.
In 2005, Bungie's April Fool's joke was that Mountain Dew was going to be featured as product placement in the DLC - there was a Mountain Dew emblem and a Chiron remake with Dew logos on some of the walls. It was a funny joke because it was ridiculous, look how shameless that is! This isn't as bad as that would have been, but it's a step closer. Though even that would have been tied to some actual content, and not a reskin of the most popular playlist in the game.
I dunno what to tell you. No matter how small it may be or how irrational the feeling is, marketing crap grosses me out and just looks totally sleazy. Putting more information about the F-150 you could win in the Infinity Challenge powered by Virgin Gaming in last week's bulletin than say, any of the matchmaking updates or other information just reminds me of The Truman Show, where Truman's wife desperately tries to shove product placement ads into every conversation, at the detriment of any actual discussion. To be clear, I'm not laying the blame on 343. I don't think any of them could stop the money train at this point, not as a fully-owned studio.
