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Gamers enraged at Ubisoft for injecting ads into the middle of video games
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Not ten years ago people were complaining about this very thing.
It's fascinating to watch the boiling frog in basically real time. Give it another 10 years and ads that interrupt gameplay will be seen as normal too.
10 years later...
I don't mind ads that interrupt gameplay, but i hate when they require you to smile at your webcam and say "i love corporation!" and give two thumbs up. Other than that, the gameplay is monotinous enough to help me forget who i am and that the world is burning.
I dont mind it when it makes sense... Like ad boards in fifa games make sense...
But if it breaka immersion, then it's stupid
or drinking a can of Monster Energy to replenish your health in death stranding...
/s
Its a Kojima game, it fits in and just amplifies the subliminal surrealism present in his games.
That one may be my favorite product placement in a game. It's so absurd it becomes ironically funny
This kind of thing is a real artform, and I love it.
Making something so bad it gets good again, because people then understand it's intentional.
Same for some visual effects in movies, or character traits, whatever. If it's too subtle, it might be seen as out of place, an oversight or a straight up error. But if you over-exaggerate it, then it suddenly works.
Reading this back, I now have no idea if I explained my thought process in a way that gets my point across.
The coin-op Pole Position in 1982 had a number of regional ads on billboards along the track, including Pepsi and Marlboro, which was the first instance of product placement in a video game.
In 2007 a number of games featured sponsored product placement. Rainbow Six: Vegas had billboards with Comcast adverts, and a Comcast company kiosk in a convention center. Far Cry 2 (humorously) had Jeep vehicles, including a couple of civilian SUVs that were significantly more cushy than the rest of the vehicles in the game. The implication being the choice of PMCs and African warlords was not the flex Jeep hoped for.
In the 2010s, companies started renting billboards on their game levels for advertising that would be regularly updated, including a couple of Ubisoft's MMO-lite titles. I think The Division 2 was one of them in which, again it was product placement. The annoyance was more that these were always-online games in which users had to be connected to the server even when they were playing single player, and the downloaded adverts only contributed to the awareness this wasn't for the advantage of the players involved.
These days, there are some pretty serious reasons not to play Ubisoft games, from their overuse and misuse of microtransactions, and piecemeal marketing, to the extremely toxic work environment that continues to be a norm in Ubisoft offices, including the sexual harassment and coercion of attractive clerks and developers by the executive staff, for which there there wasn't adequate disclosure or contrition by Ubisoft public relations.
I gave up Ubisoft games after 2020, and don't even play the Ubisoft games I own (which might at some point cost me access to them, since I do not routinely sign onto Uplay or whatever it's called now.
Drink verification can!
To be fair trackmania where ubisoft implemented that is free2play. And you can deactivate it when you bought their subscription, the only issue is that it's not sutomaticly deactivated once you buy ir
I remember seeing ads for real products in Need for Speed: Carbon (2006) and Cities XL (2009). I never really had a problem with diegetic ads that made sense (like on billboards). Interrupting gameplay to serve ads is going over the line.
Am kind of torn on this. To some games, this adds level of realism. Racing games having brand names on billboards makes it feel more real. Folks at RockStar did awesome job with faking ads on radio, billboards, etc. But not every company has the resources to reinvent the whole world. Then again, seeing ads in some other type of game. No thanks.