Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story (opens in new tab), recently revealed on Twitter that Tesla had approached him about adding the game to its library of in-car games. However, that deal never came to fruition because Tesla did not want to pay for anything other than "exposure."

Tesla's cars have been noted for several things, including catching fire, causing accidents, and being a literal gaming platform. It appears to be capable of playing relatively new and demanding games such as Cyberpunk 2077 (open in new tab). However, as with any platform, putting games on this platform requires a licensing agreement with the creators, which is where Barlow's story comes in.

"Tesla has contacted me about putting 'Her Story' on their cars," Barlow tweeted (opens in new tab)." I asked how much they would pay as licensing and engineer labor costs, and they offered zero.

The idea of exposure in this context is that creators forgo money in favor of getting their work to a larger audience and thus a larger pool of potential paying customers. Basically, it is a way for someone to get free work, and is generally not considered a good idea: The Oatmeal wrote a famous comic (opens in new tab) about the obvious pitfalls of exposure. There is also a Twitter account (opens in new tab) dedicated to ridiculing its silliness.

Predictably, many of the responses to Barlow's tweets have been quite spot-on:

And it turns out that Barlow is not the only one who has had this experience at Tesla: developers involved in the Untitled Goose Game (opens in a new tab) have also been making the same He replied in a few words that Tesla had made the same offer.

The exposure is pretty useless overall - you can't buy food or pay rent with it, but it's even more useless to Barlow than it is to most people, since "Her Story" is a bona fide indie hit. (But then, "Her Story" is a bona fide indie hit (and he has since followed up "Her Story" with the critically acclaimed "Telling Lies" and "Immortality," even without Tesla's exposure). Aside from that, the idea of putting "Her Story" on Tesla is pretty dumb from the get-go. It would be great to have a few minutes of momentary distraction while waiting for someone in the parking lot.

Barlow thought about it too.