I've only watched a few episodes of House of Cards, and none of them were this episode.

I can see why you'd consider it heavy handed. Had I watched that in the episode proper, it would have set off the 'placement ad!' bell in my head.

However, as stated elsewhere, that's orders of magnitude less invasive than a real ad., and it would not break the flow of the show, for me, at all.

It's really the same kind of exchange I have actually been involved with many times in real life.

Out of context like that it seems really obvious, but with the background of the character (he likes playing video games to relax), the first time I saw that it didn't seem so out of place for him to be interested in the gadgets. It does seem incredibly blatant in the clip though.

> (he likes playing video games to relax)

No, he likes playing video games on his PLAYSTATION(TM) to relax, and it feels like this bit of character detail was kludged in purely to satisfy the product placement requirement.

It's obvious that with a different sponsor the character would have had different behaviours.

I dunno about that. The dialogue felt natural to me.