Ubisoft Allegedly Interrupts Gameplay with Pop-Up Ads

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 309 points – Ubisoft Allegedly Interrupts Gameplay with Pop-Up Ads
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Ubisoft Allegedly Interrupts Gameplay with Pop-Up Ads::Is it a bug or a new approach to ads in their games?

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Ubisoft has responded to the situation, claiming that the pop-up ad for Assassin's Creed Mirage was caused by a technical glitch.

“It was a bug” is the common excuse when an intentional feature backfires.

Loading screen ads seem like an obvious next step of enshittification. They are creeping back into video with ads breaks on streaming, only a matter of time before they are in games too.

Yeah, we accidentally programmed ads into our games. Don't worry, we'll remove them for now and wait a few years before trying again!

Loading screens got shorter as tech improved. Now tech is too fast for proper ads so I bet there's going to be intentional delay time added in the future for more ad impressions.

The pop up may have been triggered by a technical glitch before they wanted it to. But the whole feature of course was not only developed but implemented into the live version of the game.

"Technical glitch" meaning "our operative's brains grey matter has been replaced by shit when they went to business school".

That excuse only works for people who have no ideas how programming works. New features can't appear because of a glitch.

The only thing that can indeed happen is the feature was developed and tested, and it was enabled by a glitch. But the feature necessarily was developed intentionally, because things don't just appear like that in a program.

"One of our engineers tripped and fell on the keyboard and accidentally coded an entire ad delivery system then accidentally shipped it."

The only way I could imagine this being an accident was if they'd already built the ad system and then decided not to use it because they had a burst of common sense at the last possible minute, then later on they accidentally shipped the wrong version in an update.

Imagine still buying Ubisoft games...

I wouldn't even pirate them, they suck. The Ubisoft gameplay loop is dull repetitive wank.

The last one I bought was Far Cry 3. Good game, but the launcher (Uplay?) they forced onto me was so fucking bad and broke so frequently that I vowed never to buy another unless they go zero launcher.

Honestly, it's an area where I'm really quite envious of console gamers.

Then eventually their games just became rehashes of each other, so now I won't buy or pirate them anyway. All Ubisoft games feel the same to play now, which is a shame because I think some of the environment design stuff they do is actually alright.

For me the last was Far Cry 4/Far Cry Primal, after that I feel like the series went downhill and lost the magic it once had. I still loved Ghost Recon Wildlands, though.

I will forever be sad that Ubisoft brought Nadeo and now Trackmania is a Ubisoft game :(

If removing performance-worsening DRM wasn't gonna encourage piracy, fucking ads in a game sure would!

Not that the games are even necessarily worth the disk space and download time anymore..

I would have refunded the game the first time that shit happened. That said, I quit playing Ubisoft games years ago so that's not a concern of mine.

Hold on. Let me check... Oh wait, I didn't buy any Ubisoft games, I wonder why? I wanted to play AC, but there must be a reason.

Fuck "allegedly" there are multiple videos of there of it happening.

Great now they have been given the idea this is a possibility now....

Ads don't appear in computer programs by magic or by accident. Even if its was a "glitch" you can be sure there's a reason why the user experience code has the ability to display ads.

If you like Ubisoft games, it's time to find some new favourites elsewhere.

Guess who is pirating their next Ubisoft title?

What's the point if you played one of their games you've played all of their games.

Won't the ads still show up regardless if it's pirated or not?

I stopped buying ubi games since 2-3 years ago, even when I was getting the games with discounts.