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
Stop buying their shit.
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.
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 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.
Newspapers. You paid for it, and it still got 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.
"Most agreed that promos about new games and other content are slightly more tolerable on the main menu before the game starts,"
If I see as much as a small banner ad in a game, I'm immediately refunding, and never purchasing a game from that publisher ever again.
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
--skip-launcher
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.
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.
I was looking forward to buying that game after upgrading my PC. This makes me sad. Divinity never had any ads. Maybe the pirated version gets rid of the ad.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Generally, yeah. The way they worked with Mick Gordon last game was awful though.
I didn't know about that whole fiasco. At least the end product was good. I feel bad for Mick Gordon though. I'm even more impressed that he did so well despite having to deal with that nonsense.
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.
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.
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
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.
Fair AAA will always have a core demo who don't care as long as their addiction is fed, but I think the fuss we raise should at least keep it out of the majority of games, and make people implementing it feel kind of scummy, so that's something.
Like MTX are relegated to a very specific "type" of game which is instantly identifiable, and not that well regarded compared to more, uh, pure (?) games.
Summed up: ads and dark patterns will always work on a certain segment of the population, but they don't necessarily get to be seen as normal or cool.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Guess who doesn't have to login to a Rockstar account? That's right, pirates.
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.
This happens mostly with less popular games. Stuff like GTA, Call of Duty, RDR, Starfield, etc, stays up to date in pirate sites.
Mostly a paradox issue, and they already admitted it's intentional:
"What we want to do is provide people who bought the game legally a better service. With frequent updates; good and convenient services; that's how we fight piracy," he said. "I hope it works. I keep my fingers crossed."
The forced rockstar account is 100% of the reason I refunded GTAV without ever playing it, and it's the reason I wont ever get RDR2.
all the money. literally nothing less than all the money in the entire world is enough.
And even then, they'll want more. That's capitalism
Yep. For that you need a finance industry, so you can get people to give you money they haven't even earned yet. The important thing is you don't stop spending or else the whole thing collapses
Most video game companies, or at least the huge ones, are all paying a negative tax rate.
They're a publicly traded company -- stock price has to go up.
So more. Always more.
As much as we let them keep making.
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.
It's not how much. It's how much more. They expect and require infinite growth.
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.
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.
Still playing Ubishit games
Lol
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Micro transactions are bad enough
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.
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.
The problem with the boiling frog metaphor is they would only stay in the water after being lobotomized.
Actually that makes perfect sense, carry on.
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.
Even if you paid for it? Hell no. Anyone who puts ads in games I've paid for will be immediately refunding me and never seeing another cent.
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.
What did you expect from a company whose logo is a turd seen from above!
I already don't buy Ubisoft games. Which of you spineless lukes is bankrolling this crap?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
but there's no good reason for studios to insert ads in the middle of a game
"Au contraire!"
— Ubisoft, highly likely.
In other news: Ubisoft's revenue are up 14% year on year in September
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.
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
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.
I'm mildly perturbed at best, where's our headline.
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.
From Ubisoft no less. I'm shocked I tell you. Shocked!
/s
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?
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.
Gamers are the most oppressed cultural group.
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.
Who is still playing Ubisoft games?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't you guys have ads in the 20th century?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Didn't you guys have ads in the 20th century?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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 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.
"Most agreed that promos about new games and other content are slightly more tolerable on the main menu before the game starts,"
If I see as much as a small banner ad in a game, I'm immediately refunding, and never purchasing a game from that publisher ever again.
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.
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.
I was looking forward to buying that game after upgrading my PC. This makes me sad. Divinity never had any ads. Maybe the pirated version gets rid of the ad.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Generally, yeah. The way they worked with Mick Gordon last game was awful though.
I didn't know about that whole fiasco. At least the end product was good. I feel bad for Mick Gordon though. I'm even more impressed that he did so well despite having to deal with that nonsense.
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.
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.
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
Unless it's a billboard!
Enshittification infects all.
I think we can stop this one at least
E: word
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.
Fair AAA will always have a core demo who don't care as long as their addiction is fed, but I think the fuss we raise should at least keep it out of the majority of games, and make people implementing it feel kind of scummy, so that's something.
Like MTX are relegated to a very specific "type" of game which is instantly identifiable, and not that well regarded compared to more, uh, pure (?) games.
Summed up: ads and dark patterns will always work on a certain segment of the population, but they don't necessarily get to be seen as normal or cool.
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.
Haven't bought a ubisoft game in 10 years and I have missed nothing
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
You don't need to say "artificially" here because the whole game is made by humans.
Deliberately or maliciously is more like it.
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.
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.
Guess who doesn't have to login to a Rockstar account? That's right, pirates.
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.
This happens mostly with less popular games. Stuff like GTA, Call of Duty, RDR, Starfield, etc, stays up to date in pirate sites.
Mostly a paradox issue, and they already admitted it's intentional:
The forced rockstar account is 100% of the reason I refunded GTAV without ever playing it, and it's the reason I wont ever get RDR2.
How much fucking money do they need?
all the money. literally nothing less than all the money in the entire world is enough.
And even then, they'll want more. That's capitalism
Yep. For that you need a finance industry, so you can get people to give you money they haven't even earned yet. The important thing is you don't stop spending or else the whole thing collapses
Most video game companies, or at least the huge ones, are all paying a negative tax rate.
They're a publicly traded company -- stock price has to go up.
So more. Always more.
As much as we let them keep making.
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.
It's not how much. It's how much more. They expect and require infinite growth.
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.
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.
Lol
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
And this is why retro games and open source games make up the bulk of my gaming experience
Please share some of your favorites!
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.
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.
The problem with the boiling frog metaphor is they would only stay in the water after being lobotomized.
Actually that makes perfect sense, carry on.
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.
Even if you paid for it? Hell no. Anyone who puts ads in games I've paid for will be immediately refunding me and never seeing another cent.
Imagine buying Ubisoft games.
Yo ho ho and a bottle nawmsayin
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.
What did you expect from a company whose logo is a turd seen from above!
I already don't buy Ubisoft games. Which of you spineless lukes is bankrolling this crap?
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.
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.
"Au contraire!"
— Ubisoft, highly likely.
In other news: Ubisoft's revenue are up 14% year on year in September
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.
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
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.
I'm mildly perturbed at best, where's our headline.
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.
From Ubisoft no less. I'm shocked I tell you. Shocked! /s
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?
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.
Gamers are the most oppressed cultural group.
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.
Who is still playing Ubisoft games?
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.
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.
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.