this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 53 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 101 points 11 months ago (3 children)

“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.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

In b4 they artificially lengthen load times for more ads

[–] [email protected] 51 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

"Technical glitch" meaning "our operative's brains grey matter has been replaced by shit when they went to business school".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Schrödinger's feature

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

"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.