Just in case you needed another reminder as to how disconnected the entire video game industry is from actual players, Ubisoft are now pushing in-game advertisements for other releases.
Live services, online DRM and the like have already killed gaming and turned it into a barebones shadow of its former self, however one upside to live service single player games is that corporations can now force feed you in-game advertisements that completely disrupt gameplay.
The initial concept was pitched and patented by Sony, the anti-Japanese gaming tyrant has been moving heavily in favor of movie-like “cinematic” games that are neither fun to play or entertaining to watch, patented a method of pushing interactive television commercials into video games, given the always online nature of the current gaming environment it’s only a matter of time before this grim dystopic view of advertisements become a reality.
That reality is now here, with several players taking to social media to share their recent happenings inside of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey which released back in 2018.
Given how there have been two whole mainline Assassin’s Creed installments that have since released after 2018, it would make comprehensible sense that Ubisoft would rather you go out and buy their latest mundane recycled asset flip in the form of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which we previously covered how it came with a day one DENUVO update.
If you thought Ubisoft slipping consumers the mickey in the form of an additional layer of cancerous invasive, performance regressive DRM was bad enough, they are now pushing in-game advertisements inside of their previous game entries to promote their latest rehashed collectathon.
Imagine that you’re playing a game, a single player game mind you, so no barbaric menu systems to navigate to play, being peddled advertisements and trinkets for pay-to-win EXP boosts inside of Assassin’s Creed or being subliminally pushed towards cosmetics and or loot boxes.
You’re playing a single player game and you’re interrupted to be presented an advertisement for the latest game released by the company in question, Ubisoft is well regarded for having absolutely zero morals, they are a firm believer in ESG and the environmental impact that video games apparently have with global warming, all in the vain of reducing their “carbon” footprint by recycling the same game over and over again.
This isn’t only immersion breaking but outright fucking desperate from Ubisoft’s perspective, being plugged advertisements in-game, inside a fucking single player game no less is just further proof that we need an outright collapse of the entire industry.
Upon the revelation of this advertising strategy, Ubisoft’s slop shoppers criticized such predatory methods. Several users expressed that encountering even a single advert banner would lead them to contemplate deleting the game entirely, which won’t change a goddamn thing because these simpletons continue to feed the beast at large by buying the same garbage open world video game from Ubisoft on a loop.
In response to the escalating controversy, Ubisoft released an official statement asserting that the pop-up ad for Assassin’s Creed Mirage was merely a “technical glitch”. According to Ubisoft’s spokesperson, Fabien Darrigue, the issue was swiftly addressed upon the initial reports from users.
“We have been made aware that some players encountered pop-up ads while playing certain Assassin’s Creed titles yesterday,” Darrigues told The Verge. “This was the result of a technical error that we addressed as soon as we learned of the issue.”
I highly doubt that this was just a one-off technical glitch, if anything it’s possible that following the backlash they’ve simply toggled the switch off for any future advert banners to be shown. Ubisoft will probably wait awhile until the whole media circus dies down and then implement them back in again once everyone forgets about the entire situation.
Would Ubisoft really go out of their way to patch and resolve Assassin’s Creed Odyssey? An obsolete game released over five years ago? I genuinely doubt that, but then again even Gearbox Software would go out of their way into updating Borderlands 2 just so they can plug an advertisement banner in the main menu, or the fact that 2K NBA titles previously showed real-life advertisements during loading screens.
Or how about the fact that Valve blatantly promoted other releases such as The Orange Box collection inside of Counter-Strike, both in terms of visible adverts scattered on various maps but also advert banners when viewing the scoreboard, nobody ever complained about this when Valve did it.
Gamers have become complacent, we’ve effectively been ostracized from our once niche industry in favor of always online corporate tyranny and insufferable extortion of funds, data and privacy, this is just the norm now and it’ll only continue to get worse. Just about every high profile game release throughout 2023 has been a broken, buggy mess with woeful performance and optimization, filled to the brim with woke ESG reliant writing suitable for “modern audiences” only.
Ubisoft’s latest titles are creatively bankrupt as the company themselves has absolutely no care or consideration for the swarm of loyalists who continually fund their bullshit anti-consumer antics, games such as Far Cry 6 which can be summarized as a slice of anti-White cognitive dissonance that shifts the blames of Communist Cuba onto an imaginary fascist scapegoat.
Ubisoft is a company that I absolutely just love to hate, their games are notorious for being creatively bankrupt as they accommodate the live service model, ushering in Ubisoft+ subscription services and locking the PC releases of its games to its own Ubisoft Connect platform which has become notorious for purging the online services of countless titles resulting in paying customers losing online functionality to many games and the access to various DLC content packages for said games even on single player.
Morally, the only righteous thing to do would be to pirate anything and everything Ubisoft but in my own personal opinion not even their games are worth pirating, they’re outright garbage and a total waste of braincells let alone storage space to download and play.
Personally I feel no sympathy to those whose gaming experiences have been disrupted by the actions of Ubisoft, their purchase alone is the very reason as to why this is happening in the first place, if you genuinely want to make a change in the world and stop bullshit like this from progressing forward and more blatant, stop buying Ubisoft’s wares and tell them to go fuck themselves.
