Gamers enraged at Ubisoft for injecting ads into the middle of video games

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
  
  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
- 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.
  
  The NHL games used to show ads on the boards too. Assuming they still do.
- Didn't you guys have ads in the 20th century?
  
  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.
- Haven’t bought an AC since the American revolution one, last thing I bought from them was watchdogs for $5 and it was dogshit so reinforced my no Ubishit rule
- I've been boycotting ubisoft, EA, blizzard, and the like for years. 🤷‍♂️
  (I mean, technically I've been avoiding denuvo malware, microtransactions, always online DRM bullshit, and the like, plus bad and / or uninteresting games... but that's effectively equivalent to boycotting those assholes.)

I have a hard unbreakable rule:
Free, you can serve me ads, I'll try to avoid them but ok. But the minute I pay for something and you try to give me ads on top, we're gonna have a problem.
- Newspapers. You paid for it, and it still got ads.
  I know, digital and printed ads are different.
  
  Cable TV, same thing. This is just old media execs trying to “bring back the magic” or new media execs thinking that old media techniques will work
  
  Newspapers. You paid for it, and it still got ads.
  I have never done this and I doubt I ever will.
  
  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 :)
- That’s cable TV in a nutshell. Pay to watch ads.

- I don't mind a little ad in the menu, about stuff directly related to game I'm playing. Those little "Hey we released a new content dlc to this exact game" infos can actually be informative. What I really can't stand is stuff breaking the immersion of the game. I'm not even mad about product placements, when they fit the theme and are sparsely used.
  
  Yeah, product placements like for sports games are fine... I expect to see ads in a park, arena, or stadium.
- 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
  
  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.
  
  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.

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. _
  
  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.
  
  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?
- I would a very happy person if most things in this World that reliably make one feel as "I'm doing the right thing" and frequently make one "Give oneself a pat on the back" required so little expense, time and effort as "never buy anything from Ubisoft".
  It's like winning the "well done dude" lotery once every couple of months without spending a cent.
- Ah, my hardline stance of "don't buy profitable products you can get for free" is still working out for me.

Always testing the line... This wasn't a mistake. They know you'll be upset, they are testing HOW upset and then they'll make their decision.
- If you're "upset" but buy another Ubisoft game anyway, then you weren't that upset --> Ubisoft will keep doing it.
  (you as in generic you)
- Ubisoft doesn't give a shit. Never did. They are the ones who added booster packs after certain time in game so you can progress at a normal pace instead if you pay them extra. Am actually surprised someone reacted this time since usually they are fiendishly defended by dedicated fans.
  
  They don't give a shit but if everyone rejects their bulshit, like that NFT nonsense, they will back off (and try again later)

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
  
  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.
  
  It would if everybody votes with their wallet.
- Unless it's a billboard!
- I pay for my phone and my phone and my internet access. What gives?
  
  This, but unironically.
  If I had the means to pirate my internet connection, I'd do it in a heart beat.

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.

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
  
  The coin-op Pole Position in 1982 had a number of regional ads on billboards along the track, including Pepsi and Marlboro, which was the first instance of product placement in a video game.
  In 2007 a number of games featured sponsored product placement. Rainbow Six: Vegas had billboards with Comcast adverts, and a Comcast company kiosk in a convention center. Far Cry 2 (humorously) had Jeep vehicles, including a couple of civilian SUVs that were significantly more cushy than the rest of the vehicles in the game. The implication being the choice of PMCs and African warlords was not the flex Jeep hoped for.
  In the 2010s, companies started renting billboards on their game levels for advertising that would be regularly updated, including a couple of Ubisoft's MMO-lite titles. I think The Division 2 was one of them in which, again it was product placement. The annoyance was more that these were always-online games in which users had to be connected to the server even when they were playing single player, and the downloaded adverts only contributed to the awareness this wasn't for the advantage of the players involved.
  These days, there are some pretty serious reasons not to play Ubisoft games, from their overuse and misuse of microtransactions, and piecemeal marketing, to the extremely toxic work environment that continues to be a norm in Ubisoft offices, including the sexual harassment and coercion of attractive clerks and developers by the executive staff, for which there there wasn't adequate disclosure or contrition by Ubisoft public relations.
  I gave up Ubisoft games after 2020, and don't even play the Ubisoft games I own (which might at some point cost me access to them, since I do not routinely sign onto Uplay or whatever it's called now.
  
  Drink verification can!
  
  To be fair trackmania where ubisoft implemented that is free2play. And you can deactivate it when you bought their subscription, the only issue is that it's not sutomaticly deactivated once you buy ir
  
  I remember seeing ads for real products in Need for Speed: Carbon (2006) and Cities XL (2009). I never really had a problem with diegetic ads that made sense (like on billboards). Interrupting gameplay to serve ads is going over the line.
  
  Am kind of torn on this. To some games, this adds level of realism. Racing games having brand names on billboards makes it feel more real. Folks at RockStar did awesome job with faking ads on radio, billboards, etc. But not every company has the resources to reinvent the whole world. Then again, seeing ads in some other type of game. No thanks.
- Have you ever considered how much you lower your standards so people richer than you can be even richer at your expense?
  Might want to stop doing that.

And they will get away with it because nobody does what will really hurt Ubisoft, which is NOT buy the games. No. They will simply come on reddit or here and complain, and then throw their hands up and accept it when that fails to produce any results.
- I am a little slow - what exactly I am looking at here¿? Many of them seem to be playing modern warfare 2
  
  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

That's why those who "jUsT pAy PReMiUm" are at fault. These companies are just pushing the line to see what sticks, and you're perpetuating it by paying
- Yeah, it's like all the useful idiots doing mental gymnastics to justify paying for youtube premium forget how subscription services like netflix and amazon routinely get worse over time.
- Who says that? It's not down to the people, you can't control every individual as one hive mind. If you could climate change would stop overnight.
  It's corporate greed, ads will forever be interpolated into games and movies for the foreseeable future until it's specifically outlawed to do so.
  I'm sure given the opportunity as CEO the overwhelming majority of people on Lemmy would do the same for a bigger pay packet
  
  I think it's both. Corporate greed and people helping keep this up

Gamers continue to tell these companies that they'll put up with anything while complaining online and continuing to purchase shitty games from shitty companies. Rinse and repeat.
This is 90% on consumers. Stop buying shit if you want change and I mean in any industry.
- this is what companies want you to think. it's like expecting drivers to be sensible so that we can reduce deaths from traffic accidents. it's not a solution. we have traffic lights, seat belts, all sorts of security systems and regulations on car manufacturers (though not nearly enough).
  consumer protection doesn't happen by telling everyone to be sensible. regulation is needed.
  
  And how do we get that, bud?
  
  though not nearly enough)
  Yes...there's enough. There's a reason a new car costs 30k. We don't need radar, adaptive cruise, and fucking front facing cameras (yes, thats a real thing) standard.
  I just want a heavy duty roll cage, a 200cc engine, and seat belts. All for 2k.
  (The car safety standards are a sore point for me)
- Gamers as a population really have to stop FOMO'ing into the newest games because their friends do.
  Even if it's blatantly obvious it's going to be or is a bad game people still buy them because of the network effect.
- 90% on consumers? I don't know I'd go that far... If a company is evil but provides a service people still desire, that doesn't make the evil company being evil the fault of the consumers. Like saying gun control in America is resisted primarily by its citizens when we are well aware that company lobbying is mostly at fault and most citizens are actually for some amount of gun control.
  
  Anyone who supports a company knowing how they conduct their business causes harm etc, is complicit. Once that information is learned a choice has to be made.
  
  Way to shoehorn your opinions on gun control into a thread about forced ads in video games. If we ask nicely, will you share your thoughts about Trump as well?
- Stop buying shit if you want change and I mean in any industry.
  so we should boycott every industry out there?
  
  yes
  
  I mean, do you want things to change or do you just want to complain?
  
  They said nothing about boycotting the industry. Buy games from good companies and good indie devs, that's not a boycott.
- The death of the sun will arrive before gamers actually do a boycott that is successful, because boycotts (especially for popular franchises or products) don't work. If you rally up 10,000 people for a boycott, it's less than 1% of sales AAA studios get and 70% of the boycotters are still going to buy the game regardless.
  No change is going to happen ever, so the best thing to do is to start ignoring the AAA gaming industry altogether on a personal level.
  
  A boycott only works if there's meaningful alternatives. When one publisher effectively owns an entire genre of games. Expecting consumers to boycott is exactly what the big publishers want because it's inneffective, what the publishers don't want is for regulators to start paying attention
- Voting with your wallet doesn't work. Nobody will call you to ask why you didn't buy a product, and marketing will just come up with a bogus reason on why sales are poor.
  Talking about it on social media helps a lot more.
  
  You can do both you know.

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.
  
  When you swing downtown to time square in spiderman, does your brain really care if it's a real product on all those signs?
- 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.
- 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.
  
  You don't need to say "artificially" here because the whole game is made by humans.
  Deliberately or maliciously is more 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)
- You mean rent premium (it's a subscription of course)
- Fuck cars, I want good public transit and walkable+bikeabke cities.

- 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.
- 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.
  
  Rdr2 sucks anyway, it's the Avatar of videogames.

- 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
- They're a publicly traded company -- stock price has to go up.
  So more. Always more.
- As much as we let them keep making.
- 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.

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.
  
  And it won't be long after that until these are cracked too. The ol' cat and mouse game.
  
  Yes it will.

And this is why retro games and open source games make up the bulk of my gaming experience
- Please share some of your favorites!
- Bro, I don't entirely disagree with this sentiment but I would argue that open source isn't always great despite how anyone feels about it. Unless you are categorizing open source with indie games. In my experience open source games are typically not great in the slightest at all. However, I agree with this sentiment if open source is being referenced to indie games. A game doesn't really have to be FOSS to be great.
  The issue isn't really games like Assassin's Creed either the issue is big companies. Assassin's Creed isn't my game but I hear the newer ones are good. Assassin's Creed wouldn't need to be open source to be good.
  
  I love my Armored Core and Baldur's Gate for obvious reasons, but there are some absolute gems in the FOSS scene too (And I'm not even gonna mention all the indie stuff) like Mindustry, Xonotic, Zero-K, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Unciv just off the top of my head.
  Even though alot of them are just rehash of older titles or abandoned projects but even those are improved far beyond their original iteration. What I actually find problematic with FOSS games are stuff like low player count leading to a poor multiplayer experience and most games being very old school-ish (Xonotic is literally an arena shooter made on basically the Quake engine 🤷)
  
  In my experience open source games are typically not great in the slightest at all.
  Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is probably the most-sophisticated zombie survival game I'm aware of, albeit not graphically beautiful.
  
  Down voted for not kissing OSS ass

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.

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.

The only ads I want in my video games are in-world lore appropriate ones. Like the biomechanical penis implant ad from Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
- Hell, I'd be fine for in-game adverts in sensible and relatively unintrusive spots (like a Spiderman 2 ad on a times square billboard in Spiderman 1/Miles Morales). But that won't happen.
- That's not what he's saying at all, unless you think biomechanical penises are a real product.

They are doing fucking what?!

Enshitification going so hard I wouldn’t even pirate it.
But who am i kidding, the pirated version will likely have this crap removed, better performance without denuvo and all exclusives unlocked. Yarrrr
- But this worse than enshitification. These games are not free. There shouldn't be ads in paid games.

Imagine buying Ubisoft games.
- Yo ho ho and a bottle nawmsayin
  
  They're not worth the minutes it takes to download them. When was the last Ubisoft game that was better than Hades?

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 so many people accept ads in every other part of their life and then act surprised when they get more ads showing up.
You can't pick and choose. You have to reject all ads. They're a cancer we let it metastasize
- I wish your method would get the results you want. I know way too many people who sit through ads for energy to play mobile games. I know way too many people who will sit through freevee or still pay over a hundred bucks a month for cable tv, somehow. It'll never change.
  Coming soon is all the streaming video companies with advertisements on paid subs. Netflix has removed the cheap tier from new subs and replaced it with an ad tier. Amazon is planning on removing no-ad content from amazon prime next year. Pretty much every streaming company except apple has an ad tier or is planning one soon.
  Advertisement is pervasive and honestly a huge problem. It should be prohibited from a huge swath of services, especially healthcare, but also as an optional thing on basically every platform. I truly believe ads make everything worse.
  
  The enshittification of streaming services has pushed me back to sailing the seas.
  And I plan on sharing all that I have with anyone who wants it.
  An additional insult is publishers or authors changing their old stuff (Terry Pratchett is re-editing his old novels, the old Bond books are being edited because the language is "offensive", etc).
  I'd like to maintain my own library of un-altered stuff.
  
  It gets crazier to me when I start counting how many minutes of my day is spent being advertised too. I get ads on the radio to work. I get ads in the song themselves because DJ deEzNutz took a deal with McDonald's to include a hook where he talks about those two sweet beef patties. Meanwhile I'm staring at every billboard one the way to work. I see all the signs on the bus stops. I see the ads on the bus themselves. Hell I get 8 hours between work and bed. How many of those are spend watching a commercial. This is such a wacky situation and I feel like Rowdy Piper in 'They live'.
  
  I know way too many people who sit through ads for energy to play mobile games. I know way too many people who will sit through freevee or still pay over a hundred bucks a month for cable tv, somehow. It’ll never change.
  It's so sad because these people could block those ads and use free streaming services.
  Blokada 5 blocks ads in apps, but you have to download it from their website because Google blocked all apps that use Blokada's functionality from the Play Store.
  Here's a free streaming service to watch pretty much anything for free, just make sure you have Adnauseam or uBlock Origin installed: https://fmoviesz.to/
  The problem is that we, as a culture, don't pride ourselves on saving money. We pride ourselves on getting taken advantage of because that's what everyone else is doing. Useful idiots and tools are the norm. They get mad whenever someone rises above their stupidity.

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.

but there's no good reason for studios to insert ads in the middle of a game
"Au contraire!"
— Ubisoft, highly likely.

Yet another reason to continue my boycott of Ubisoft.
- I wouldn't say I'm consciously boycotting Ubisoft, personally. But I sure as hell haven't bought one of their games for a long time, and with the way they've been going as a company in general, I can't see myself buying anything from them in the near future. If they do release something worth buying then I'll consider it, though.
  
  My last Ubisoft title I didn't get for free was AC4 I think. Chose a good time to drop off. Like you I'm not boycotting actively as much as I hate their practices and they have shitty games that all feel pretty similar after a certain point.
  
  I started by consciously boycotting Ubi, but it became so easy, pretty much immediately, that I barely think it counts any more.

In other news: Ubisoft's revenue are up 14% year on year in September

I might be wrong, but don't they plan or already do put anticheat into single player games so people don't cheat-in the various ingame currencies they have to buy XP boosts (where without them leveing is a crawl)?
There thou art... The Big Three. Thy faces, AAA Publishers. Thy actions barely worthy of the name. Didst truly believe thy ploy would succeed? Dist believe Jolly Roger's would not notice? Publishers thou may be, yet thou hast proven thyselves fools, every one. The supplication of Ubisoft. The whimper of Activision. The death mewl of Electronic Arts...
- I discovered that when playing FarCry 5. I attached cheat engine to it to do some messing about and the game would force crash itself every time. Annoyed me that I couldn't ruin my own SP experience

The marketer's nightmare is that whenever you exploit a new vector to target consumers with ads, whenever you invent a new commercial style to which adults are responsive, you are simultaneously instilling resistance into their kids so they will grow up largely immune.
And if it's particularly invasive or annoying (such as interrupting fun to ad at them) they'll hate your company for the ads more than they like the product.
- To be honest, it's only the smartest people in the ad industry that even talk about this big picture stuff.
  My favorite version of the discussion was referring to shitty advertisers as the equivalent of polluters destroying the ecosystem.
  And you see it over and over. Mobile banner ads when they first came out had a 15% CTR. Fifteen percent.
  That's insane.
  But within a year of using them for irrelevant and crappy ads with lousy landing pages those numbers dropped dramatically and by now they average around 0.4-0.8%.
  What both most advertisers and consumers typically don't understand about advertising is that at its foundation, it's something that's intrinsically motivated for users.
  When you know about a great product, you tell people about it.
  When you hear about a great product for something you are in market for, you pay more attention to find out more.
  That's the natural inclination.
  It's just not the case in practice because for a century companies have tried to exploit that tendency to grab attention when they don't actually deserve it, to lie about their products, and to generally poison the ecosystem beyond repair.
  And it's a prisoner's dilemma, as the few companies that would like to be more responsible with their ad content and placement have competitors who throw caution to the wind and mess it up for everyone.
  In practice, almost no one really thinks about the long term consequences of doing stupid shit with advertising that will cause consumers to ignore most of their future efforts. And you typically see a consistent small percentage of the overall advertising reach that converts (and the secret about this small percent is it's mostly the portion of the population that's highly suggestible that's being taken advantage of).
- If anything, I'd say the current kids are far more ad-tolerant than the, let's say, 90s "kids". The ads in games are normal to them.
  
  It goes farther than ad-tolerant, a lot of them enjoy the ads. They see them as a natural part of the content.
  
  For real. I'm less than 5 years older than some of my wife's friends, and they were almost awestruck that I have basically ZERO ads in our house. Every device has uBlock, Sponsorblock, ReVanced, SmartTube, whole house has PiHole and a couple of other things. And these are CS majors and engineers, so it's not like they aren't at least semi tech-savvy. They just accept the ads as if they can't do anything about them.
  But I say fuck it, because literally every content creator I like does zero sponsorship or ad deals, and they all manage to make fantastic content. I'll give them $1000 via their Patreon or merch before I'll watch a single ad for shit like Raycons or Raid: Shadow Legends. Ads are absolute cancer and the more ads you see for a product, the shittier it is, almost guaranteed.

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 🤣

Enraged gamer #40,679, can confirm.
- I'm mildly perturbed at best, where's our headline.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gamers are the most oppressed cultural group.