Ubisoft has responded to reports that they seem to have added pop-up ads to their games, that work while you are in the middle of playing a game.
While some countries and regions have rules on how video game companies advertise video games, there’s enough leeway in there for companies to try new things. For this reason, when the EU banned lootboxes as microtransactions, companies looked for other models to make business. For example, what is in vogue now is the season pass, which has both free and premium paid tiers.
Tech4Gamer started out sharing accounts from fans that while they were playing the game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, they would get a pop-up ad to get them to also buy and play Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the most recent game in the franchise, and Ubisoft’s latest release. From what it looks like, Ubisoft had decided to focus on advertising the new game to players of the previous games.
But this is not the end of the story. Ubisoft claims they have addressed issues with this pop up ad, and described these ads as a “technical issue.” As reported by The Verge, Ubisoft spokesperson Fabien Darrigues shared this statement:
“We have been made aware that some players encountered pop-up ads while playing certain Assassin’s Creed titles yesterday.
This was the result of a technical error that we addressed as soon as we learned of the issue.”
So if Ubioft is to be believed, these pop-up ads were not intentional on their behalf. They surely would have known that such aggressive advertising and marketing actions were more likely to backfire on the PR side, if they did turn out to be successful enough to add to Ubisoft’s business.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise remains one of the most popular under Ubisoft, but recent entries have faced liberal amounts of criticism lately. With this going on, and Ubisoft’s far more serious issues with sexual misconduct and inappropriate workplace behavior, the company is walking on pins and needles. The last thing they need is to deal with a PR gaffe like this.
It does raise questions, if this wasn’t something Ubisoft intended to come up, why such a thing happened in the first place? Did Ubisoft add the functionality for such a pop up into this older game, and change their mind about implementing it later? It’s really hard to imagine that some strange serendipitous happenings made a pop-up come up spontaneously.
We do have to take Ubisoft’s word for it for the moment, unless they want to talk about some unimplemented plans. If no further incidents like this appear over the weekend, Ubisoft will have likely addressed this bug.
