Gamers enraged at Ubisoft for injecting ads into the middle of video games
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Comments325https://www.techspot.com/news/100953-gamers-enraged-ubisoft-injecting-ads-middle-video-games.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.nz
Can we boycot the companies that do this already. I get the AC IP is nice, I've certainly enjoyed my fair share of their games.
But the ad industry is completely getting derailed. What's next ? Watch a 15s promo video every time you want to open te fridge? Watch a promo video before you can open the door?
Have your walls randomly show you ads?
Stop buying their shit. Regardless of how decent the game is. Punish them for the predatory practices. Demand refunds.
But no. People will likely be outraged, and then next game angry and then the next game they'll suck it all up and complain about the good all days.
#remindmein5years
I always thought the cyberpunk genre was a warning, not a blueprint.
Don't Create the Torment Nexus etc etc
Wow! The torment nexus is so cool! I wanna live in the torment nexus! *creates torment nexus*
I can't get into the genre, it's too real to be fun
Way ahead of you.
Yeah, unfortunately, it is hard for me to hurt their bottom line because I checked out of the series after Origins.
That said, I've never sought a refund on a digital copy of a game, but I wouldn't hesitate if I paid full price for a game only to find out there were in game ads
I got the package deal with all of them over the summer and loved origins 😅 been working my way through them all to get ready for the new one. I was thinking I'd go this route of getting it and returning if I saw ads, but based on comments about the company having rape apologists I might need to do some more research before even bothering to take that risk
Same. I checked out of the series back when they started enforcing U-Play use. I can't understand why anyone would buy any of their games. Ubisoft went mask off a long time ago.
Companies should focus on making in-game advertising appear 'diegetic' as opposed to the low hanging fruit of inserting it like a sore thumb.
Had Ubisoft scattered a number of graffiti or town criers in Odyssey's cities talking about visiting a foreign land for less money the next few days only, where the art direction looked and felt perfectly at home in the world itself and interacting with the hooks alerted users to the promotion details, this would have been way less disgusting to players.
You didn't have players revolting when Cyberpunk's 2.0 update suddenly had characters talking about Dogtown which then hooked into trying to upsell the DLC. It fit the world and was something that could be ignored or engaged with as desired.
GTA: Online's phone calls hooking into paid or new content are another example of doing it better (though their frequency is tuned really poorly).
The problem is most publishers don't want to spend the extra time and money to fit ads into the worlds players are in. Which is dumb, as testing a really terrible UX that players will revolt on and press will cover negatively is going to shoot in the foot an initiative that would have gone much smoother with a bit of elbow grease and respect for the players.
Especially with the increase in in-game commerce I expect that we will see a spike in in-game advertising over the next few years, and with advances in generative AI that might even end up being tailored to the in game world as well much more often.
But the reactivity of the audience here means that the publishers who do a good job on limiting the degree to which moving in that direction abuses the playerbase are going to end up much better off than the ones that think dumb shit like a popup ad in the game UI during play is a good idea.
Drink verification can to proceed.
There's a blackmirror episode that touches on ads invading our lives like this
Black Mirror episodes coming true or already being true is hedging into "Simpsons did it!" Territory
I'm pretty certain that I read a comment like this back in 2010 to 2012 on Reddit. Hell it may have been on Slashdot or Digg back in 2008.
As you've said, the only way to stop this is for everyone to stop feeding the beast. The problem is that F2P works now in 2023 as a business model, and clearly worked back in 2010 as DDO, and SW:TOR are still chugging along.
I don't think it is feasible to end these predatory practices unless one can manage to get every single government in the world to outlaw them. Good luck on that.
Well, for one I think we've played the sum total of what Assassin's Creed has to offer, at this point. I haven't seen Ubisoft bring anything much new or compelling to the table since... AC3? I think? I've been doing just fine without it for all these years.
IIRC there were some racing games that actually did show you real ads on billboards and pit walls and so forth, which were updated over the internet. Need For Speed: Carbon did this, I think. I'm certain there are already other similar examples, and you'll probably find them in something published by EA.
I'm all for giving the finger to the megacorporate publishers who do this, though. I have got so many fuckin' indie games in my Steam library still, many of which I haven't played much or at all, a large portion of which are great, and all of which will give me something to do other than put up with what the predatory behavior du jour is (advertisements, subscriptions, lootboxes, battle passes, microtransactions, or whatever the fuck else).
Battlefield games also had billboards. Granted they were torn up, but they were advertisements. Tbh I'm okay with ads if they fit into the game.
Have a game with a TV? I'm okay with ads getting inserted into the fake-TV programming so long as they're in the style of the game.
Have a game with billboards? Okay, but again, it needs to be in the style of the game.
I'm willing to forgive some level of advertising in games, especially if they're from smaller studios, they just need to be non-intrusive and fit the style of the game. I'm more forgiving if you've put the work and effort into making the ad look and feel like it's part of the world. An example is if GTA VI had radio ads that were self-depricating and/or self-parodies of the real-world companies advertising in-game.
There is no greater ad on the planet like the pißwasser commercial in gta4.
There is no greater ad on the planet like the pißwasser commercial in gta4.
How about the example of Transformers(2007) where GM very gently shoehorned their product into nearly every character.
This movie killed the movie theater for me, I felt like I paid to watch a commercial
Ironic, considering Transformers was literally made to sell Japanese toys.
The NHL games used to show ads on the boards too. Assuming they still do.
Didn't you guys have ads in the 20th century?
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Didn't you guys have ads in the 20th century?
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Haven’t bought an AC since the American revolution one, last thing I bought from them was watchdogs for $5 and it was dogshit so reinforced my no Ubishit rule
I've been boycotting ubisoft, EA, blizzard, and the like for years. 🤷♂️
(I mean, technically I've been avoiding denuvo malware, microtransactions, always online DRM bullshit, and the like, plus bad and / or uninteresting games... but that's effectively equivalent to boycotting those assholes.)
I have a hard unbreakable rule:
Free, you can serve me ads, I'll try to avoid them but ok. But the minute I pay for something and you try to give me ads on top, we're gonna have a problem.
Newspapers. You paid for it, and it still got ads.
I know, digital and printed ads are different.
Cable TV, same thing. This is just old media execs trying to “bring back the magic” or new media execs thinking that old media techniques will work
Apparently when cable first came to be, there were no ads
Probably the same case for newspapers, radio, the internet, movies in theatres, gas station pumps etc. Though each new medium we create has a shorter and shorter Time-To-Ad-Platform runway it seems
The first cable TV system in the U.S. was built in the late 1940s and had ads from day one since it was created to bring network television to communities with poor reception. Cable has always had ads.
I have never done this and I doubt I ever will.
I'm in my 40s. The last time I can remember buying a newspaper, was when I did it for my parents as a kid 🤷
My parents might have handed me some change to operate the box of newspapers outside the grocery store when I was three or four so I could try opening it. But I'm not even sure if I got to do that.
Newspapers are a long metro ride thing for me. Just never got the hang of smartphones, not in that way that is. Also the interaction is different, and I don't mean the physical aspects but the way you browse through something with a) a finite amount of information and b) with very few (if any) links. A physical paper comes with an included progress bar. You know, sense of pride and accomplishment and all.
I'd love to buy and read newspaper. Really do. And I don't even have to commute. But newspaper here are just trash. It's all about which celebrity cheated who with whom, political propaganda, garbage about crime and some other things. Rarely anything interesting. So I just skip.
How old are you?
30
Same, and I have bought some before, for different reasons that I don't even remember lol, but yeah, I wouldn't buy one just to read it now lol.
I mean sure, but it’s also been literally a decade since I bought a newspaper.
I bought it for the coupons.
This is why Amazon Prime was an instant cancel.
If you still want to watch amazon video content, you can stream pretty much anything for free here: https://fmoviesz.to/
Just make sure you have Adnauseam or uBlock Origin installed.
I just started watching the 2nd season of Invincible :)
look up cloudstream and thank me later
That’s cable TV in a nutshell. Pay to watch ads.
I don't mind a little ad in the menu, about stuff directly related to game I'm playing. Those little "Hey we released a new content dlc to this exact game" infos can actually be informative. What I really can't stand is stuff breaking the immersion of the game. I'm not even mad about product placements, when they fit the theme and are sparsely used.
Yeah, product placements like for sports games are fine... I expect to see ads in a park, arena, or stadium.
it even adds to the authenticity in those games, perfect example of it done right. the problem is advertisers thinking their template applies to every medium without exception
But also the deciders in the dev studios, that take the money even if it doesn't fit or don't integrate it properly.
Baldur's Gate 3 was probably the best game of this year (?), but it has an advert for the DLC as soon as you launch it
However, it's also probably one of the least-bad "triple A" games of this year when it comes to overall monetisation, that singular DLC of cosmetics and the soundtrack being the only one available
Unfortunately, I think this one is a losing battle
Advertising dlc is ok in my opinion, it's for the product you're using and not everyone checks for new dlc
I was going to ask where the ad was, but I forgot that I turned off the launcher specifically because of that. I have no idea about PS but you can add the following on PC to skip the lau8
Yeah, you absolutely can, but knowing to do that means that the advert has already delivered its message to you.
Futzing around with the launcher settings seems like more work than just clicking "no" on an advert that pops up.
You're right, once. But adding that one time means I never have to see the launcher again. Clicking no means extra launch time and looking at it every time I launch the game.
But different strokes for different folks. If it's not worth it to you then that's cool. It was worth it for me and I thought I'd drop that for anyone else who may want it.
I have the same launcher settings set, so I mean I kind of agree? But you've seen the advert, and that's basically all they want.
I just think it's kind of weird how people react to things once they've filtered their thinking through the hivemind of the internet versus before.
Sony didn't have both versions readily available in the Playstation Store. While I did eventually purchase the DLC (which is the deluxe version, not a typical DLC), I'll be damned that Sony didn't make it easy to find the OG version in the store.
And I put that on Sony, not the game publisher. Regardless, BG3 has been a breath of fresh air to gaming this year. About time a studio put out a full game without divvying it up into expansions and DLCs.
I agree that BG3 is a great diversion from the usual. My point is kind of that if you're a purist about this, you're missing out on it, even though on the whole it bucks the trend.
Baldur's Gate 3 has no dlc at all. It has no dlc even announced, let alone available for purchase. Stop making shit up lol. Their launcher has info about the different games they've made and their prices, but when you actually launch the game it has NO ad of any sort. You could only barely call the info in their launcher an ad in the first place.
kind of awkward that this both:
it's absolutely coconuts that you're currently attempting to die on the hill of a giant "buy now" button not being an advert
also, you do realise that the launcher is an advert? that's its whole reason to exist. your take is essentially "you're dumb because after you've clicked through the adverts, there aren't any adverts"
I mean I guess Divinity never had ads unless you consider the launcher an advert for their other titles, given that that's basically what it's there to do?
If you don't consider anything in launchers to be adverts then I guess you can play BG3, because that's where the advert for the DLC lives?
I really feel like if Larian had only given you the soundtrack and not the cosmetics, and just not called it DLC, that people really wouldn't be so up in arms about it.
Ah, my hard line stance of "never buy anything ubisoft" is still working out for me.
Ubisoft, epic, ea, Blizzard/Activision...
I wont say Bethesda because I'm hoping for another Doom or Quake.
_EA is the fucking devil. They bought my favorite game, Ultima Online, and ruined it. _
That's tragic and I feel your pain.
I'm glad that game had such a community surge of custom shards to keep it going, but it sure fractured the community. :(
get in line. ubisoft is the same by the way. they own the rights to my favorite IPs: prince of persia and flashback and all they're doing is releasing shovelware.
Generally, yeah. The way they worked with Mick Gordon last game was awful though.
If you didn't say it I was gonna.
Well Doom 2016 at least. Doom Eternal fucked over Mick Gordon and DLCfyied the game. The cracks are forming.
Can't complain about the quake update.
What's the problem with Epic Games, besides No Tux no Bux and anti cheat rootkits?
I mean those suck, but it has to be more than that right?
Delisting and shutting down the Unreal and Unreal Tournament games. General lootbox bs.
Talk about forgetting your roots...
Delisting the single player games that don't require a master server to be maintained was just salt in the wound.
Owned in part by Tencent
They haven't made a decent game in 15 years so...there's that.
I would a very happy person if most things in this World that reliably make one feel as "I'm doing the right thing" and frequently make one "Give oneself a pat on the back" required so little expense, time and effort as "never buy anything from Ubisoft".
It's like winning the "well done dude" lotery once every couple of months without spending a cent.
Ah, my hardline stance of "don't buy profitable products you can get for free" is still working out for me.
Always testing the line... This wasn't a mistake. They know you'll be upset, they are testing HOW upset and then they'll make their decision.
If you're "upset" but buy another Ubisoft game anyway, then you weren't that upset --> Ubisoft will keep doing it.
(you as in generic you)
Ubisoft doesn't give a shit. Never did. They are the ones who added booster packs after certain time in game so you can progress at a normal pace instead if you pay them extra. Am actually surprised someone reacted this time since usually they are fiendishly defended by dedicated fans.
They don't give a shit but if everyone rejects their bulshit, like that NFT nonsense, they will back off (and try again later)
True. And it usually works or at least to a degree, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it.
Something you're paying for should be completely ad free, period.
I wish that's how the world worked, unfortunately it's not
The World worked that way, but people accepted the new ad contained products they paid for.
People even think it is fine to buy a product you don't own
And people are making excuses for the forever inflating greed..
I mean, how do you accept inflating prices and costs while your salary has been stagnant for decades?
It just doesn't make sense how costs, on individuals, are growing and growing.
I don't I just pay the same amount since I was born /s
And get less and less for the same payment :p
It does work like that. You vote with your dollars. If you buy these companies’ products, you confirm they made the right decision.
If enough people abandon their products, they change the model or die.
What you say you like and what your dollars say you like are 2 different things. The sooner people realize this the faster things will improve. But, if people are unwilling to avoid buying products from bad companies, things will get worse. Welcome to capitalism.
Unfortunately you're not quite right with this one. As an individual, me choosing not to buy a new Samsung TV which has ads on the menu isn't going to directly effect the sales and/or profit of the model to any measurable significant margin. Especially if I was going to buy LG anyway.
If the entire population was able to communicate as one hive mind and apply your utopian strategy it would work, but unfortunately its exceptionally difficult to convince that amount of people.
This is the exact same concept and difficulty behind battling climate change (not buying and doing things which hurt the environment)
Yes I agree capitalism is .... Well... Capitalism 🤣
You don’t have to be a hive mind to make a difference. Everyone gets one vote (or one bank account) to make things better or worse, even if it is only a very small amount. You can contribute to the society you want or the society that is convenient. Sometimes you have to sacrifice comfort (or entertainment) to influence the things you want society to be. If enough people agree, things get better. If you are just bitching about how you are being taken advantage of but willingly allow it to happen… c’est la vie…
Society is a collection of individuals. If enough people buy into the “1 person can’t change things” then everyone makes things worse a little but at a time. Buy what you want, vote how you want, but you are making things better or worse with every choice you make.
It would if everybody votes with their wallet.
They do. That's the problem.
I like to compare that argument to climate change. If everyone voted with their wallet to not buy/do things which are bad for the environment we would stop climate change over night.
Now think about how impossible that is and then remember, that collective effort is just as difficult as stopping people buying things which contain ads
No it wouldn't. Corpos would just put in more effort to hide the damage. Climate change can't be stopped by individual consumers because they have no means to verify whether a product they want to buy hurts the environment.
There are products which you can guarantee have a major negative effect on the environment yet people still purchase them. This is exactly the same as people buying games and products with ads baked in.
I pay for my phone and my phone and my internet access. What gives?
This, but unironically.
If I had the means to pirate my internet connection, I'd do it in a heart beat.
Oh absolutely. I used to get free data on a blackberry I had, and it was great. Free YouTube all day!
Enshittification infects all.
I don’t mind in-game ads printed on in-map billboards and stuff, but ads that interrupt gameplay? Fuck that. Especially if you’ve paid for the content.
Not ten years ago people were complaining about this very thing.
It's fascinating to watch the boiling frog in basically real time. Give it another 10 years and ads that interrupt gameplay will be seen as normal too.
10 years later...
I don't mind ads that interrupt gameplay, but i hate when they require you to smile at your webcam and say "i love corporation!" and give two thumbs up. Other than that, the gameplay is monotinous enough to help me forget who i am and that the world is burning.
I dont mind it when it makes sense... Like ad boards in fifa games make sense...
But if it breaka immersion, then it's stupid
or drinking a can of Monster Energy to replenish your health in death stranding...
/s
Its a Kojima game, it fits in and just amplifies the subliminal surrealism present in his games.
That one may be my favorite product placement in a game. It's so absurd it becomes ironically funny
This kind of thing is a real artform, and I love it.
Making something so bad it gets good again, because people then understand it's intentional.
Same for some visual effects in movies, or character traits, whatever. If it's too subtle, it might be seen as out of place, an oversight or a straight up error. But if you over-exaggerate it, then it suddenly works.
Reading this back, I now have no idea if I explained my thought process in a way that gets my point across.
The coin-op Pole Position in 1982 had a number of regional ads on billboards along the track, including Pepsi and Marlboro, which was the first instance of product placement in a video game.
In 2007 a number of games featured sponsored product placement. Rainbow Six: Vegas had billboards with Comcast adverts, and a Comcast company kiosk in a convention center. Far Cry 2 (humorously) had Jeep vehicles, including a couple of civilian SUVs that were significantly more cushy than the rest of the vehicles in the game. The implication being the choice of PMCs and African warlords was not the flex Jeep hoped for.
In the 2010s, companies started renting billboards on their game levels for advertising that would be regularly updated, including a couple of Ubisoft's MMO-lite titles. I think The Division 2 was one of them in which, again it was product placement. The annoyance was more that these were always-online games in which users had to be connected to the server even when they were playing single player, and the downloaded adverts only contributed to the awareness this wasn't for the advantage of the players involved.
These days, there are some pretty serious reasons not to play Ubisoft games, from their overuse and misuse of microtransactions, and piecemeal marketing, to the extremely toxic work environment that continues to be a norm in Ubisoft offices, including the sexual harassment and coercion of attractive clerks and developers by the executive staff, for which there there wasn't adequate disclosure or contrition by Ubisoft public relations.
I gave up Ubisoft games after 2020, and don't even play the Ubisoft games I own (which might at some point cost me access to them, since I do not routinely sign onto Uplay or whatever it's called now.
Drink verification can!
To be fair trackmania where ubisoft implemented that is free2play. And you can deactivate it when you bought their subscription, the only issue is that it's not sutomaticly deactivated once you buy ir
I remember seeing ads for real products in Need for Speed: Carbon (2006) and Cities XL (2009). I never really had a problem with diegetic ads that made sense (like on billboards). Interrupting gameplay to serve ads is going over the line.
Am kind of torn on this. To some games, this adds level of realism. Racing games having brand names on billboards makes it feel more real. Folks at RockStar did awesome job with faking ads on radio, billboards, etc. But not every company has the resources to reinvent the whole world. Then again, seeing ads in some other type of game. No thanks.
Have you ever considered how much you lower your standards so people richer than you can be even richer at your expense?
Might want to stop doing that.
And they will get away with it because nobody does what will really hurt Ubisoft, which is NOT buy the games. No. They will simply come on reddit or here and complain, and then throw their hands up and accept it when that fails to produce any results.
I am a little slow - what exactly I am looking at here¿? Many of them seem to be playing modern warfare 2
It's a Steam Group for an MW2 boycott, you're seeing the members of that group and what they're playing.
And then theres the one dude playing fucking half life 2 deathmatch.
I always found this to be a bad example. 15 people out of the 51 on that page are playing the game they're in a boycott group for. That's a clear minority, even if that had been representative of all 1557 members.
It's page one, so I don't think this is a selected subset.
This is just the people playing right now, and only people playing on steam. This doesn't show all of the people who bought the game or are playing on console.
Obviously none of the gaming boycotts have worked, and we're both putting way too much thought into one image.
Haven't bought a ubisoft game in 10 years and I have missed nothing
That's why those who "jUsT pAy PReMiUm" are at fault. These companies are just pushing the line to see what sticks, and you're perpetuating it by paying
Yeah, it's like all the useful idiots doing mental gymnastics to justify paying for youtube premium forget how subscription services like netflix and amazon routinely get worse over time.
Who says that? It's not down to the people, you can't control every individual as one hive mind. If you could climate change would stop overnight.
It's corporate greed, ads will forever be interpolated into games and movies for the foreseeable future until it's specifically outlawed to do so.
I'm sure given the opportunity as CEO the overwhelming majority of people on Lemmy would do the same for a bigger pay packet
I think it's both. Corporate greed and people helping keep this up
this is what companies want you to think. it's like expecting drivers to be sensible so that we can reduce deaths from traffic accidents. it's not a solution. we have traffic lights, seat belts, all sorts of security systems and regulations on car manufacturers (though not nearly enough).
consumer protection doesn't happen by telling everyone to be sensible. regulation is needed.
Gamers as a population really have to stop FOMO'ing into the newest games because their friends do.
Even if it's blatantly obvious it's going to be or is a bad game people still buy them because of the network effect.
90% on consumers? I don't know I'd go that far... If a company is evil but provides a service people still desire, that doesn't make the evil company being evil the fault of the consumers. Like saying gun control in America is resisted primarily by its citizens when we are well aware that company lobbying is mostly at fault and most citizens are actually for some amount of gun control.
so we should boycott every industry out there?
The death of the sun will arrive before gamers actually do a boycott that is successful, because boycotts (especially for popular franchises or products) don't work. If you rally up 10,000 people for a boycott, it's less than 1% of sales AAA studios get and 70% of the boycotters are still going to buy the game regardless.
No change is going to happen ever, so the best thing to do is to start ignoring the AAA gaming industry altogether on a personal level.
Voting with your wallet doesn't work. Nobody will call you to ask why you didn't buy a product, and marketing will just come up with a bogus reason on why sales are poor.
Talking about it on social media helps a lot more.
The first time I saw Ubisoft doing this was actually kinda neat because it was done well.
It was Rainbow Six Vegas/Vegas 2 and the billboards and posters scattered around were real ads. I thought it was a clever way to improve immersion.
Funny, cause nothing breaks immersion faster for me than product placement.
The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you'd see ads is when realistically it'd be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.
I remember one map was set at an exports event and they had esports sponsors everywhere.
Placement isn't the issue though.
If you recognize it as a legit/real advertisement, that breaks the immersion.
Your mind thinks "Why am I paying money to watch commercials?", and that breaks the immersion of whatever virtual world you're in at the time.
If the game is set in the "real world", an advertisement for a fake brand of a real product is, to me at least, more immersion breaking than it being a real brand for that product. Now if the game isn't set in our world it's a completely different story.
The thing though is that the real advertisement will remind you that you paid money to watch a commercial, and that's where the immersion breaking happens.
With a fake ad you know you didn't pay real money to some other real human being somewhere else, and that your purchase went just for the recreational value of the game you're playing.
In other words, it's not the content of the ad, but the realization that it's a real ad, regardless of it's content, that's immersion-breaking.
When you swing downtown to time square in spiderman, does your brain really care if it's a real product on all those signs?
Yes, advertisements in game environments have always been the place to make stupid puns.
I loved the Pißwasser ads in GTA IV.
Clever or not, you're not paying to watch advertisements, you're paying to play a game as a recreational activity.
I did think it was clever, but I distinctly remember for R6V1, every single billboard, truck side, and bus stop poster, was Shia LaBeouf staring at you with binoculars for the movie "Disturbia" lol.
I guess in the R6 universe that was going to be the biggest film release of the century hahaha. Maybe they just didn't get a ton of takers?
I think they did this in certain regions for battlefield 2142 also
I want to note since people are not happy with this example and still talking about the good old days, this method is pretty old-school In X-Men Mutant Academy is a pretty bad example but that's why I remember it and I want to provide some sort of proof
I stopped buying Ubisoft games years ago. It was around that that time where they forced always-online mode on their single player games.
I stopped playing their games (literally) because I was sure from that point on the user experience is only going to get worse. I thing I was right in that decision.
Oo I think you got out before the custom launcher with it's own BS currency that constantly "lost" your "cd keys" so you couldn't even play singleplayer games you bought on steam huh? Good move. Well played.
It's been so long I wouldn't be surprised to find that they just cancelled my account but all my "keys" were used already and my games just won't work anymore lol .
Meanwhile Black Flag occasionally downloads an update and I'm like "Yeah maybe one day..." Lol
Assassin's creed and Siege ruined ubisoft.
They just stopped trying because they learned they can just milk loyal fans for all eternity.
Corporate culture killed Ubisoft.
Late stage capitalism ruined or will ruin every corporation FTFY
I stopped when I saw Valhalla didn't have achievements on Steam. To me that represents either extreme pettiness or extreme laziness on their parts and I won't support either.
That's enough for me to never buy any of their games ever again.
Remember when they said that if we pay for the product, we dont get ads? :)
I also remember when they
artificiallydeliberately reduced XP gained after certain time in game so you either had to grind harder or buy booster packs. And they said it was adding value to the game because you get more playtime.This is such transparent bulshit excuse. Who wants their playtime to be more grind? But it's probably why Assassins' Creed even adopted XP systems at all.
If anything I want to go back to the days games had baked in cheats to become invincible and unlock everything so we can fuck around when we feel like it.
And yet franchise is thriving. AC was never my thing, especially because of boring fetch quests and collect-a-thons. WoW also had bunch of annoying quests like that, but at least the world building was awesome and lore was plentiful to enjoy the game.
I like the franchise because I'm into history. I was really looking forward to Mirage after the grindfests that were Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, but news like this make me consider not even waiting until Mirage is 50% off at some point.
True true.
Sometimes you don't even get the product if you pay for the product. AC: Odyssey will be in my Steam library forever unplayable because I had to delete my Ubisoft account for being hacked into and their support team absolutely refused to let me associate the game I purchased and thought I owned to a new Ubisoft account.
Fuck those guys. I will never pay money for their games ever again.
i can't wait for the day when we will need to watch ads or buy premium before we can use our cars
BMW already tried to charge $18 a month for heated seats.
Wait, so they failed to implement that? (Jeez i hope so)
Nope, my boss has an i4 that has this bullshit.
I have an audi a3 that has the hardware for adaptive cruise control but cant use it because of the same bullshit...
Car market is fuuuucked
Edit : fyi, i wasnt aware of the problem when ordering it, and its a company car so i didnt pay for it
You still bought the car
Leased it, company car, so i havent paid a single euro for it. And i didnt know they would pull this shit off. I ordered it without adeptive cruise control and got this shit instead.
I would never buy an audi lol, but as a company car, meh.
You mean rent premium (it's a subscription of course)
Fuck cars, I want good public transit and walkable+bikeabke cities.
Forza Horizon 4 did this but worse. It would be an unskippable 2 minute video ad ignoring your volume settings. It only played 5 times in my 45 hours of gameplay but it was so damn unacceptable that it's reminding me to give that game a negative review.
Forza Horizon 5 does not do this. Get that game or something else instead.
Fuck Ubisoft
Simple, but it speaks the truth.
[Everyone] enraged at [any company] for injecting ads into the middle of [everything]
I wish
The some way people are getting all "just buy Premium" at YouTube's ever increasing amount of ads is getting so annoying.
When they inevitably introduce Premium Plus and put ads in paid users' content, you know, like many streaming services are doing now, maybe they will realize that there is no reasonable deal that sates these corporations.
If you bought a game you shouldn't have adverts. You're watching YouTube for free, very different things.
Did you miss the part that paying subscriptions now provides less and less guarantee of remaining ad free? Don't take for granted that paying will keep that from you.
If it was about being fair, they would be fine with just keeping a moderate amount of ads. I didn't start blocking until they started to push multiple pre-roll ads and then several more every 10 minutes. Time does not suffer inflation, much on the contrary. If they try to take more and more of our time as payment, that's proof of their greed and disregard towards their users.
Speaking of YouTube, I still don't get any ads on my premium.
Speaking of YouTube, I still don't get any ads on my premium.
And I don't get ads on my free.
Praise uBlock 🙏
They should be enraged about the rape apologists who are in charge of the company. But consumers forget fast when the shiny new thing is out.
I would even say most never cared in the first place. They want their toys and they don't care where it comes from.
Wasn't that Blizzard/Riot?
It was all 3.
Lo and behold, gaming men are typically shit. Probably has something to do with their stunted growth.
There are sadly more companies with rapists in them than those two. It got swept under the rug faster.
When piracy becomes more convenient to actually play the game sail those ships boys
It won't be long for publishers to offer cloud gaming platform only exclusive titles.
"Cloud" gaming is inaccessible for a lot of consumers. They're priced out or geographically limited.
Maybe currently. How about 5 yrs later? 10? Cloud gaming is like consoles. Not everyone owns one but they still able to make a large profit.
This time it's just that "console" is hosted in the "clould."
5 and 10 years is too optimistic. Infrastructure upgrades too slowly. ISPs compete and have monopolies on certain areas.
Maybe I'm, but I'm pretty sure it's eventually tho I really hope not.
Last generation, Microsoft was trying to sell the Xbox One as "always on" and told Keighley that, if people didn't like it or didn't have internet, they could buy an Xbox 360. An entire console was going to roll out as always online. So, video game companies have already rebutted your argument themselves.
I remember this, but that's literally for the activation or licenses. Which Microsoft implemented. In the settings for the Xbox app on Windows or the console itself, there is a toggle for making it the primary device for offline access. It sets for 30 days. After 30 days you connect again and the timer resets. Excluding games that explicitly run always online for because of forced multiplayer (Need for Speed, Division 2, etc).
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/connect-network/using-xbox-one-offline
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/game-setup-and-play/play-games-offline-on-windows-10-using-offline-mode
This uses a miniscule amount of data and can be done on any internet type. It's literally a check in.
It was not originally for just the activation and licenses. Their plan was for it to launch as "always on". If I recall correctly, it was going to require phoning home every 24 hours; hence the outcry at the time and the infamous Keighley interview. They rolled back a ton of the stuff with that console that they said was a "requirement" for functionality. Regardless of whether it launched, if it wasn't for the outcry, they would have launched it. That's an entire console. I have a hard time believing they wouldn't roll out a "cloud only" game - you feel me?
It's also a fucking scam because you don't get to own the products.
Just like with netflix and hulu, the company can and will adjust terms to give the least while charging the most.
It's sad how gung-ho so many people in this generation are with renting shit. But I guess that's why most of ya'll are bad with money 🤷
And it won't be long after that until these are cracked too. The ol' cat and mouse game.
It would take a lot more for them to steal a game that has no public executables though, like they would need some proper hacking or corporate espionage
There's a cracked Diablo 4 available and it's "online only". There are still bugs they're working on but as far as I know it's fully playable from start to finish.
That's different, it's not a game hosted elsewhere that you connect to via streaming. You download diablo 4, you have the game available to crack.
Cloud gaming environments are controlled and monitored. It's basically a TeamViewer for you to game on a restricted host. You can't just copy the binaries to your computer. You need to actually hack it and exfil the data, which is illegal btw. This will be very hard, except some stupid *** misconfigure the server.
It's not just piracy, it's archiving. How these games going to be played in centuries from now? It's called the "digital darkage" and we're living in it.
DRM and locking to cloud servers is like trying to assigning things to being lost to the future.
Yes it will.
There are people who are not already angry at Ubisoft?
Ubisoft did one good thing in my book: Rayman. That's it.
You mean the old game when Ubisoft use to be a name to respect? In the era when Activision and Interplay were some of the best development companies and had awesome games instead of ruining franchises. Yeah sure. Rayman was cool.
Ubisoft made splinter cell, farcry 2, ghost recon, and rocksmith. They did a lot of good things over the years. Problem is, they've changed.
They made a lot of good games back in the day.
Ubisoft used to be known for their quality, and they still have a lot of very talented developers under their belt.
The problem, as usual, is management and players with low standards.
The talented developers don't get to do more because players are willing to accept less. So that's what management tells them to do.
The key is to have higher standards, but nobody wants to admit they got suckered into buying or liking shit.
Anno, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Asscreed Black Flag, Far Cry 3.
None even remotely interests me.
And this is why retro games and open source games make up the bulk of my gaming experience
What if we took cable tv... And combined it with gaming?
Fuck off with this shit. Micro transactions are bad enough
Remember when Cable TV was supposed to be ad-free? That's happening to Streaming now too.
Apparently not. Ubisoft is the one who sells you the right to play the game on release date for extra money and punishes others who pay the regular price.
I dunno, given how bad and buggy games are at release these days, seems more like the ones paying more are getting punished.
Sure, that's how we see it but for them that somehow has value. Why would anyone want to rush and pay extra to play the game they don't even know is worth that money and there are no reviews is beyond me.
Hype is an effective marketing tool, If not for that many current triple-A games would sell less, and indies would sell more.
disgusting. it doesn't surprise me. publishers are continously testing how much their customers can bend over.
Gamers continue to buy the games by publishers that do this and will continue to put up with it as they slowly boil like frogs.
It's difficult to fight the slow conditioning that started with horse armor and Farmville. There's no escaping it until we replace capitalism with something better.
They are doing fucking what?!
The only ads I want in my video games are in-world lore appropriate ones. Like the biomechanical penis implant ad from Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
Hell, I'd be fine for in-game adverts in sensible and relatively unintrusive spots (like a Spiderman 2 ad on a times square billboard in Spiderman 1/Miles Morales). But that won't happen.
That's not what he's saying at all, unless you think biomechanical penises are a real product.
Fake funny ads over real ads of any type, was how I interpreted it. Think Rick and Morty Cable TV ads.
Enshitification going so hard I wouldn’t even pirate it.
But who am i kidding, the pirated version will likely have this crap removed, better performance without denuvo and all exclusives unlocked. Yarrrr
But this worse than enshitification. These games are not free. There shouldn't be ads in paid games.
Imagine buying Ubisoft games.
Yo ho ho and a bottle nawmsayin
They're not worth the minutes it takes to download them. When was the last Ubisoft game that was better than Hades?
Don't laugh at me..is splinter cell on PS3 by ubi??
I already don't buy Ubisoft games. Which of you spineless lukes is bankrolling this crap?
What did you expect from a company whose logo is a turd seen from above!
I'm so behind companies doing this because too many people accept ads in every other part of their life and then act surprised when they get more ads showing up. It would be nice if this stuff woke people up.
You can't pick and choose. You have to reject all ads. They're a cancer we let it metastasize
I wish your method would get the results you want. I know way too many people who sit through ads for energy to play mobile games. I know way too many people who will sit through freevee or still pay over a hundred bucks a month for cable tv, somehow. It'll never change.
Coming soon is all the streaming video companies with advertisements on paid subs. Netflix has removed the cheap tier from new subs and replaced it with an ad tier. Amazon is planning on removing no-ad content from amazon prime next year. Pretty much every streaming company except apple has an ad tier or is planning one soon.
Advertisement is pervasive and honestly a huge problem. It should be prohibited from a huge swath of services, especially healthcare, but also as an optional thing on basically every platform. I truly believe ads make everything worse.
The enshittification of streaming services has pushed me back to sailing the seas.
And I plan on sharing all that I have with anyone who wants it.
An additional insult is publishers or authors changing their old stuff (Terry Pratchett is re-editing his old novels, the old Bond books are being edited because the language is "offensive", etc).
I'd like to maintain my own library of un-altered stuff.
Terry Pratchett isn't re-editing anything, he sadly is no longer with us.
It gets crazier to me when I start counting how many minutes of my day is spent being advertised too. I get ads on the radio to work. I get ads in the song themselves because DJ deEzNutz took a deal with McDonald's to include a hook where he talks about those two sweet beef patties. Meanwhile I'm staring at every billboard one the way to work. I see all the signs on the bus stops. I see the ads on the bus themselves. Hell I get 8 hours between work and bed. How many of those are spend watching a commercial. This is such a wacky situation and I feel like Rowdy Piper in 'They live'.
It's so sad because these people could block those ads and use free streaming services.
Blokada 5 blocks ads in apps, but you have to download it from their website because Google blocked all apps that use Blokada's functionality from the Play Store.
Here's a free streaming service to watch pretty much anything for free, just make sure you have Adnauseam or uBlock Origin installed: https://fmoviesz.to/
The problem is that we, as a culture, don't pride ourselves on saving money. We pride ourselves on getting taken advantage of because that's what everyone else is doing. Useful idiots and tools are the norm. They get mad whenever someone rises above their stupidity.
Take it back...call it defective. Fuck that shit, I don't care how good the game is, they're not getting my money ever again.
"Au contraire!"
— Ubisoft, highly likely.
Yet another reason to continue my boycott of Ubisoft.
I wouldn't say I'm consciously boycotting Ubisoft, personally. But I sure as hell haven't bought one of their games for a long time, and with the way they've been going as a company in general, I can't see myself buying anything from them in the near future. If they do release something worth buying then I'll consider it, though.
My last Ubisoft title I didn't get for free was AC4 I think. Chose a good time to drop off. Like you I'm not boycotting actively as much as I hate their practices and they have shitty games that all feel pretty similar after a certain point.
I started by consciously boycotting Ubi, but it became so easy, pretty much immediately, that I barely think it counts any more.
In other news: Ubisoft's revenue are up 14% year on year in September
I might be wrong, but don't they plan or already do put anticheat into single player games so people don't cheat-in the various ingame currencies they have to buy XP boosts (where without them leveing is a crawl)?
There thou art... The Big Three. Thy faces, AAA Publishers. Thy actions barely worthy of the name. Didst truly believe thy ploy would succeed? Dist believe Jolly Roger's would not notice? Publishers thou may be, yet thou hast proven thyselves fools, every one. The supplication of Ubisoft. The whimper of Activision. The death mewl of Electronic Arts...
I discovered that when playing FarCry 5. I attached cheat engine to it to do some messing about and the game would force crash itself every time. Annoyed me that I couldn't ruin my own SP experience
The marketer's nightmare is that whenever you exploit a new vector to target consumers with ads, whenever you invent a new commercial style to which adults are responsive, you are simultaneously instilling resistance into their kids so they will grow up largely immune.
And if it's particularly invasive or annoying (such as interrupting fun to ad at them) they'll hate your company for the ads more than they like the product.
To be honest, it's only the smartest people in the ad industry that even talk about this big picture stuff.
My favorite version of the discussion was referring to shitty advertisers as the equivalent of polluters destroying the ecosystem.
And you see it over and over. Mobile banner ads when they first came out had a 15% CTR. Fifteen percent.
That's insane.
But within a year of using them for irrelevant and crappy ads with lousy landing pages those numbers dropped dramatically and by now they average around 0.4-0.8%.
What both most advertisers and consumers typically don't understand about advertising is that at its foundation, it's something that's intrinsically motivated for users.
When you know about a great product, you tell people about it.
When you hear about a great product for something you are in market for, you pay more attention to find out more.
That's the natural inclination.
It's just not the case in practice because for a century companies have tried to exploit that tendency to grab attention when they don't actually deserve it, to lie about their products, and to generally poison the ecosystem beyond repair.
And it's a prisoner's dilemma, as the few companies that would like to be more responsible with their ad content and placement have competitors who throw caution to the wind and mess it up for everyone.
In practice, almost no one really thinks about the long term consequences of doing stupid shit with advertising that will cause consumers to ignore most of their future efforts. And you typically see a consistent small percentage of the overall advertising reach that converts (and the secret about this small percent is it's mostly the portion of the population that's highly suggestible that's being taken advantage of).
If anything, I'd say the current kids are far more ad-tolerant than the, let's say, 90s "kids". The ads in games are normal to them.
It goes farther than ad-tolerant, a lot of them enjoy the ads. They see them as a natural part of the content.
For real. I'm less than 5 years older than some of my wife's friends, and they were almost awestruck that I have basically ZERO ads in our house. Every device has uBlock, Sponsorblock, ReVanced, SmartTube, whole house has PiHole and a couple of other things. And these are CS majors and engineers, so it's not like they aren't at least semi tech-savvy. They just accept the ads as if they can't do anything about them.
But I say fuck it, because literally every content creator I like does zero sponsorship or ad deals, and they all manage to make fantastic content. I'll give them $1000 via their Patreon or merch before I'll watch a single ad for shit like Raycons or Raid: Shadow Legends. Ads are absolute cancer and the more ads you see for a product, the shittier it is, almost guaranteed.
Rainbow Six Vegas 2 had ads in it for a movie. I thought it was neat. But it wasn't intrusive. The ads were on legit movie theater posters in the game for a movie.
Enraged gamer #40,679, can confirm.
There are plenty of games in the wild these days, not to mention on my back log, that if this became common practice it’d probably be a good thing. Personally I’d focus on what I already own or retro. So, bring it on 🤣
I remember there was actually a pizza Hut commercial in a Playstation 1 demo disc. It was one of the Pizza Hut sampler discs.
Things are different now.
That was actually a solid deal because most people didn't have game collections or exposure to a lot of great titles.
Whoever got away with putting Metal Gear Solid on one of the demo discs changed my life. It's a shame we'd never see something like that in the modern day.
I miss demo discs. But going on YouTube and Twitch I think also kinda changed how people see what games they want.
Thanks to demo discs I got into Resident Evil 2, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, WWF Smackdown and few other games.
I mean this is the same Ubisoft franchise that snuck in Denuvo as a day one patch. It'd be funnier if it weren't so upsetting that nothing will change and the game industry will keep chugging on.
Putting ads in a 5 year old game is definitely an odd thing to do.
Active player count got to be in the dozens by now, surely?
From Ubisoft no less. I'm shocked I tell you. Shocked! /s
Bunch of chumps would complain then immediately go buy the golden collector's edition pre-order anticipated-access + battlepass bundle. If you're that person, you deserve to be taken advantage of. The only reason they keep pushing the envelope of the shit they think they can get away with is because you keep paying for it.
Who is still playing Ubisoft games?
Nice, I remember Admix just starting out and product placement in Guitar Hero
Not sure why they are using pop ups though, seems lazy
No. I meant Rayman, even Origins and Legends.
I don't usually care about in-game DLC ads or things like that, as long as they're relegated to a Store section, but god damn.
This is too far.
Ubisoft has been anti-consumer for a long, long time.
Oooh angry gamers, so scary. Let me see a title saying "Ubisoft losing profit, it just won't stop jesus christ!" Then I can get a NE out of this.
I'm enraged they made a Facebook sequel rather than a legit game to my wife's favorite computer game ever, and it seems there no hope of the series ever coming back.
If you buy a Ubisoft game in this day and age there is no way you don't know what you are getting into and the kind of shitty company you are supporting, and you still support it, and its practices, by buying their shit.
So you have absolutely zero right to bitch, moan, and be upset about the very Ubisoft style shit that Ubisoft does.
You do have a right to criticize bad business.
If you willfully stick your arm into a raging fire after decades of warnings not to, You don't get to complain about the fire after it hurts you, or how much it hurt you, or anything else.
You've made your choice, now shit down, and shut up, because no one wants to hear it about how bad it is that you ignored every warning and sign and even common fucking sense.
edit
So many fucking butt hurt idiots cradling their metaphorically burnt arms and demanding sympathy around here, i swear.
You, for one, seem way better adjusted than anybody who willy-nilly sticks their arm into raging fires.
I know not to buy from known shitty companies, that they only get shittier with time and monetary support via continuing to purchase their crap.
It doesnt take a particularly massive intellectual might to figure that out, but apparently that is just expecting to much from the average gamer.
Your username is very fitting
"Yes, yes! It must be You, who dare speak common sense that is the idiot!
For it can not be me that is the fool, Who bought a pile of shit, and now wish to cry emphatically about receiving a pile of shit from the man famous for supplying shit!
I shall whine, and cry, and expect the world to lavish upon me nothing but the highest of sympathies for me getting hurt by my own willful actions and ignoring of all warnings and sense!"
I just don't understand what the takeaway is from the figure of speech "if you... then you have no right to..."
In this case, clearly not everyone knows. And if complaining is prescribed as forbidden then fewer will know going forward. It's possible that some people aren't gamers immersed in the dogmatic culture but looking to try something out.
Advertising is a drain on society that encourages regular people to choose and act suboptimally.
There are absolutely allowed to be laws around advertising and people absolutely have the right to be annoyed when those laws are not properly protecting them.
Video games are no longer a wild frontier, it's a 50 year old established industry and market that is wildly profitable and absolutely deserves to be legislated into polite and proper conduct.
We absolutely should bitch and moan that meaningful legislation is not being passed on this front.
Your username checks out.
Pretty sure I have the right to be dumb and bitch and moan all at the same time. Funny thing is though, no one seems to be complaining about my right to be smart and lie and cheat at the same time - as long as it's a business and I don't lie on my taxes anyways.
Totally agree.
These people deserve what they get. If they don't like it, stop paying for it.
But interceder, I GOTTA HAVE MY SHINY NOW.
HOW CAN YOU EXPECT ME TO DO WITHOUT MY GODDAMN SHINY YOU HORRIBLE MONSTER!?
/s
I thought that this was an ad on Lemmy. Glad it's not, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do have ads just like Reddit