Look, I just tried to write my Hello World script in Rust and suddenly a video player appeared showcasing the new Assassin’s Creed in Dolby Vision surround HDR when I ran it. Must have mistyped a semantic sign. Give them some slack. Mistakes happen.
Ubisoft always has the most obnoxious in-game ads. The release version of Steep was alright, apart from a microtransaction store and blatant energy drink ads in events.
Later on the game did these:
Pop-Up ads for new DLC, sometimes chained
Bright orange STORE button
The selector wheel to change your sports like Snowboard or Ski, added the DLC sports, greyed them out and constantly dingled in front of you to buy them this way
And that they broke the game engine after an update (alpha effect stutter, even on high performance rigs) and never fixed it was just the cherry on top
For Honor is just as problematic and had full screen ads for new characters. Both of these titles were full price mind you.
So just stating the obvious, as it’s on a technical platform. So are they running an AI that made this ad and put it into a directory that was accessible by the game services runtimes? Or….did you get caught trying some dodgy shit in a fully paid product. It’s more morally right to have a cracked backup of everything of theirs you own or don’t because in their eyes you clearly don’t own what you paid for.
Even taken at face value, it means that they purposely built the ability to have an ad pop up not just on the main menu screen, but anywhere... or at least (giving them a strong benefit of the doubt) on the map screen.
The "error" was that someone popped it into the "show up on map" area of their code and not the "show up on the main menu" area of their code... but the bigger, more glaring problem is that it is even allowed to be a thing that exists as an option.
So even with all that allowance, the fact that it can be a thing is absolutely terrible and it doesn't matter that it happened as an accident, but it shouldn't be an option regardless... is the point of my rambling.
I mean, Valve just accidentally added an extremely early Left 4 Dead prototype to CS1.6 or HL1 (not sure which), after they updated their old games for the Half-Life anniversary.
Of course, the reputations of both companies being what they are, the reactions to those accidents or errors were completely different.
Not too tack to hard the devil’s advocate side of things but if you’re expecting morals from a business, that’s a you problem. I can appreciate the point you’re trying to make but still kind of a senseless comment.
But the thing is, you generally don't just magically have the ability to seamlessly plop an ad into a part of the game. That kind of thing needs to be purpose built, to either have the option to plop an ad on the main menu + map, or to (more heinously) plop an ad ANYWHERE in the game.
So worst case scenario (well, not WORST because the game doesn't, like, go back in time to kill your grandfather or something) is that someone higher up said "Hey, what if we could put an ad anywhere in the game? Get the team working on that" and it was done... best case scenario is that I guess their games are coded so well that they can just seamlessly plop in a chunk of code that doesn't break anything else and just works?
But going off of past experience with Ubisoft games, that best case scenario is kind of laughable (insert a screenshot of the guy's face texture not loading for AC Unity here).
They are just lying. I don't trust this response for a single moment. We have seen how the slope as far as game monetization practices goes is in fact slippery.
Sports games already use in-game ads. They will keep going for as long as players take it.
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