As Batocera continues to grow and support more and more devices, the resources needed for such an infrastructure have steadily been increasing. Therefore the rather controversial decision has been made to deploy in-game advertising while you’re retro-gaming!
We estimate that there are over 23,000 users of Batocera who play for over an hour of time per month. Working with the estimates that Google Doubleclick have provided us, this means we can target a profit of at least $3,400 per month, which should be more than enough to support the growth. In the future, we intend on playing video inserts in between game launches, akin to how Youtube plays advertisements before watching a video.
With this sort of a budget, we could upgrade the potato-powered build system to a proper PC! And maybe buy some more devices to support as well. Check out the continued development of the feature at https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/pull/5912. Of course, we thank all our users for being understanding, you won’t even notice anything different.
Edit: April fools!