Assassin’s Creed Odyssey players were horrified last week when pop-up ads began appearing in-game, advertizing a Black Friday sale for Assassin’s Creed Mirage. According to an official statement by Ubisoft, the ads appearing was as a result of a "technical error", and has since been patched out of the game.
"We have been made aware that some players encountered pop-up ads while playing certain Assassin’s Creed titles yesterday," Ubisoft said, speaking to The Verge. "This was the result of a technical error that we addressed as soon as we learned of the issue."
The advert popped up in-game for one particular player when they tried to access the map. Rather than opening the map, the player had to dismiss the full screen advert before being able to access the map. This is common in free-to-play mobile games, but it’s not something most people tend to expect from a full price, triple-A video game.
In-game adverts are nothing new, and outside of mobile games, it’s a concept that a number of developers and publishers have tried to push for in recent years. Each time, however, they’ve been forced to back down as a result of the absolute, outright fury of fans at the simple idea. It’s not hard to see why players would be annoyed: getting ads in a game you haven’t paid for, while annoying, is easy to justify. If you’ve just dropped $60 on a game, however? That’s a lot harder for companies to justify, and it’s a big red line for many fans.
While Ubisoft has since removed the advert, it’s hard to see why players should take much solace from this. After all, it’s clear that this could not have emerged from nowhere, and is likely to be a planned future inclusion for many of Ubisoft’s live service and even single player games. The strong backlash seen in the Reddit post where this was discovered is proof enough that gamer outrage about in-game ads hasn’t cooled any, and Ubisoft would be wise to push back any plans it might have to start including ads in any of its games going forwards.