Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed ad fumble hints at dark future for video games

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that main menus often have adverts for new DLC or sales for other games in the same franchise.

It can be a bit immersion-breaking and serves as a final way to try and get cash out of your wallet before you dive into a long play session, but mostly it’s something we’ve learned to live with. Even ads on in-game billboards or product placement can be looked past. But now imagine those ads popped up during your playtime, while you were mid-mission trying to pull up a map to better plan your strategy. No need to imagine it, this happened to an Assassin’s Creed Odyssey player on Nov. 22. They claim that a pop-up ad interrupted them when they tried to open the map, showing them a Black Friday deal for the newest AC game, Mirage. The Assassin’s Creed team was quick to label this a technical error, but a lot of gamers, myself included, aren’t buying it.

Developers care about making art, but Triple-A video game companies don’t; they’re here to sell us products and make a profit for their shareholders and investors. That’s why we’ve seen live-service games boom in popularity. Rather than a one-off purchase we keep buying add-ons, skins, weapons, and more. For far less investment, companies can squeeze more money out of us. It’s hard to do this in single-player games like Assassin’s Creed, but that’s clearly not going to stop companies from pushing their luck as far as we’ll let them.

Fortunately, people erupted at the notion their single-player game was being interrupted by ads, and the AC team had to quickly reassure us that it was just a technical error. This may be a tinfoil hat moment for me, but I believe these mistakes are often tests to see how much consumers are willing to take. Video games really are a perfect place for ads. They ensure our eyes are glued to a screen for hours on end. How much could a company sell that kind of attention for? It’s just as comically evil executive Sorrento says in Ready Player One, “Once we can roll back some of Halliday’s ad restrictions, we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures.”

If we don’t push back, hard, every time one of these “mistakes” happens, that really is the future we’ll be left with. Even if it is, we’ll be fine. There are more video games out there right now that any of us could complete in a lifetime, and worker-owned indie companies will continue to make games that put players first, so there will always be something great to play.