According to posts on online forums, ads have made their way into real-time gameplay in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. One gamer who reported the problem was Redditor triddel24,...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The way that Bethesda has handled Doom has been nothing short of excellent. Hopefully they continue to support Id however they need it to keep on making great games.
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.
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.
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.
This is what I thought when micro transactions in paid games started around 10 years ago. I was wrong.
Ubi will pull the classic pretwnt it was an accident, then in two years slowly roll it out. People will kick and scream, but still buy their shit. Then it'll become normalized and slowly get worse. Next gen of kids growing up used to this won't know what the big deal is when we complain.
Same cycle over and over with all kinds of stuff over the past 20 years.
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.
I don’t mind in-game ads printed on in-map billboards and stuff
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
I also remember when they artificially deliberately 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.
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.
Gaming has been following the shitty trends of video streaming companies for a while now. I bought RDR2 on the Steam sale to finally play through and immediately refunded it when I saw they force you to sign in with a Rockstar account. I don't want any offline games where I have to sign in.
I remember putting a cartridge into a console and powering on to an immediate start screen. There shouldn't be EULA or T&C prompts or inescapable splash screens on timers for any of these games. There shouldn't be standalone studio launcher applications that take up nearly a GiB of hard drive. Nobody wants them, nobody is impressed by them, and it takes away from the fun. It seems I'm done with all Blizzard, Origin, and Rockstar games for good now, where in the past I would've gladly shelled out $$$ for deluxe and ultimate editions like a chump.
Pirating games isn't nearly as attractive as other media. Big studio Games are usually released in a broken state and pirate sources rarely keep titles updated.
I wonder if adguard for desktop or portmaster would be helpful for this issue. I can't get portmaster to work on my system, mostly because some of its processes require the execution of BAT files, my antivirus will block those.
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.
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.
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.
Bro, I don't entirely disagree with this sentiment but I would argue that open source isn't always great despite how anyone feels about it. Unless you are categorizing open source with indie games. In my experience open source games are typically not great in the slightest at all. However, I agree with this sentiment if open source is being referenced to indie games. A game doesn't really have to be FOSS to be great.
The issue isn't really games like Assassin's Creed either the issue is big companies. Assassin's Creed isn't my game but I hear the newer ones are good. Assassin's Creed wouldn't need to be open source to be good.
I love my Armored Core and Baldur's Gate for obvious reasons, but there are some absolute gems in the FOSS scene too (And I'm not even gonna mention all the indie stuff) like Mindustry, Xonotic, Zero-K, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Unciv just off the top of my head.
Even though alot of them are just rehash of older titles or abandoned projects but even those are improved far beyond their original iteration.
What I actually find problematic with FOSS games are stuff like low player count leading to a poor multiplayer experience and most games being very old school-ish (Xonotic is literally an arena shooter made on basically the Quake engine 🤷)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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 🤣
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.