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Gamers enraged at Ubisoft for injecting ads into the middle of video games (www.techspot.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 63 points 2 years ago (12 children)

The first time I saw Ubisoft doing this was actually kinda neat because it was done well.

It was Rainbow Six Vegas/Vegas 2 and the billboards and posters scattered around were real ads. I thought it was a clever way to improve immersion.

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  • [–] 39 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Funny, cause nothing breaks immersion faster for me than product placement.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you'd see ads is when realistically it'd be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.

    I remember one map was set at an exports event and they had esports sponsors everywhere.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you’d see ads is when realistically it’d be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.

    Placement isn't the issue though.

    If you recognize it as a legit/real advertisement, that breaks the immersion.

    Your mind thinks "Why am I paying money to watch commercials?", and that breaks the immersion of whatever virtual world you're in at the time.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    If the game is set in the "real world", an advertisement for a fake brand of a real product is, to me at least, more immersion breaking than it being a real brand for that product. Now if the game isn't set in our world it's a completely different story.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    The thing though is that the real advertisement will remind you that you paid money to watch a commercial, and that's where the immersion breaking happens.

    With a fake ad you know you didn't pay real money to some other real human being somewhere else, and that your purchase went just for the recreational value of the game you're playing.

    In other words, it's not the content of the ad, but the realization that it's a real ad, regardless of it's content, that's immersion-breaking.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    When you swing downtown to time square in spiderman, does your brain really care if it's a real product on all those signs?

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago

    I did think it was clever, but I distinctly remember for R6V1, every single billboard, truck side, and bus stop poster, was Shia LaBeouf staring at you with binoculars for the movie "Disturbia" lol.

    I guess in the R6 universe that was going to be the biggest film release of the century hahaha. Maybe they just didn't get a ton of takers?

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