According to the French publisher, some of the ads in the two older installments of the franchise did not appear on purpose.

A similar attempt was made in 2007, but it was an official one. At the time, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, and Rayman Raving Rabbids were all available for free download, but they came with ads. There were ads in the menu, under the loading screens, and once during a cutscene, but no ads during gameplay, according to the forum post at the time (this advertising model, if I remember correctly, only worked in the US).

This is what Ubisoft is trying to do now, as we think the company led by Yves Guillemot is testing something. In any case, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage was promoted by the French publisher in Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey during map loading. In other words, players got an ad in full-priced games as Ubisoft’s way of pushing the latest installment of the franchise in their faces. That’s pretty cheeky, but the French say it was just a technical error.

In a statement sent to Eurogamer, Ubisoft reported that they became aware of pop-up ads in certain Assassin’s Creed games and that they have fixed the technical error. But even beyond that, there are already ads in the franchise’s games… as the company often promotes new episodes of the series in the main menu, so even if you consider that an ad, marketing has already crept into the games, although not in as blatant a way as before.

What can we learn from this? Ubisoft is up to something again and it won’t end well. They’re going to start applying it to their other frequently released IPs and then blame it all on a technical error. We need to do something about this, otherwise none of the spoiled parties in the game industry will learn.

Source: Gamesindustry