Assassin’s Creed Players Annoyed by In-Game Ad for Mirage, Ubisoft Responds

Ads for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and everything in between are pretty much all anyone can expect to see online for the next couple of days now that Thanksgiving is behind us and the holiday savings are in full swing, and in-game ads are no exception. Live-service games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and more always make it a point to show you what’s featured in their in-game stores during times like these, but one would think that a single-player game would at least provide some sort of refuge from these ads. Unfortunately for Assassin’s Creed players, that hasn’t been the case this week.

That’s because some older Assassin’s Creed games have apparently been hitting players with ads for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the newest of the mainline Assassin’s Creed games that came out in October. Mirage is 20% off right now in the Ubisoft Store, a fact which Ubisoft put right in front of people who were simply trying to access basic menus in Assassin’s Creed games.

In-Game Ads for Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Over on Reddit, a player shared a clip from their time with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey this week that showed them trying to access the map. Instead of being taken right to that map as expected, the player was instead presented with a huge ad for the Assassin’s Creed Mirage sale. The ad helpfully included a “Buy” button, too, in case you decided that right there in the middle of your Assassin’s Creed Odyssey play session was the right time to buy a game that’s been readily available for over a month.

“Nice Ubisoft. Classy as always,” read one of the top comments on the post.

Others chimed in with agreement saying that they would “immediately uninstall” if they saw something like this in one of their games. Some said that they’d seen ads like this one on the start menus for different Assassin’s Creed games which is a bit more understandable considering that’s exactly what many of the service games mentioned before do, so people are accustomed to it whether they like it or not, but this particular instance still hasn’t gone over well with players at all.

So, what does Ubisoft have to say about the situation? In a statement shared with The Verge, Ubisoft attributed the ad to a “technical error.”

“We have been made aware that some players encountered pop-up ads while playing certain Assassin’s Creed titles yesterday,” a Ubisoft spokesperson said. “This was the result of a technical error that we addressed as soon as we learned of the issue.”

As others have pointed out, the ad specifically mentioned the Black Friday sale and correctly relayed the current discount for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, so whether it was a technical error or something else, there was obviously some intent behind the ad given how up-to-date it was. Some in the social comments speculated that the player in question was included in a test for how these in-game ads would be received, and if that’s the case, the response has been clear.