The only thing proving this isn’t satire is the fact it was published on the official Assassin’s Creed YouTube channel.
I mean…fucking hell.
Seems as good a time as any to bring this up.
Play the Assassin’s Creed Spin to Win Game [Ubisoft, via Polygon]
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37 responses to “Video Game Pre-Ordering Jumps 17 Sharks, Lands On Face”
To make it even worse “Open to US residents only”.
Not only is it fucking stupid, it’s not even open to the rest of the world.
What’s the Too Video; Didn’t Watch version?
If you pre-order the game, you get 5 chances to win prizes every week via a virtual slot machine app. So the earlier you pre-order, you should have a higher chance of winning something (although the chances are probably still quite low).
Pre-order for a weekly slot machine pull to win prizes. “The sooner you pre-order, the sooner you can start winning!”
Preorder the game, get free spins on a virtual slot machine each Friday to win random prizes like merchandise, trips to places, the usual stuff.
EDIT: An hour after the comment, 3 people answer within a minute of each other 😛
I don’t get all the hate towards pre-ordering games. It’s such a wierd thing to be angry about.
Paying full price for a product which you can’t be sure of quality-wise and if you don’t do it, large portions of the product are walled off to you.
Let’s do this as a book:
Book comes out in six months and although it sounds good, it’s written by 30 people and you have no idea how good any of them are at writing. If you pre-order at full price, you get a bonus chapter in the middle of the book that fills in some character motivation, Exclusive access to chapter titles, and a free dust jacket!
If you don’t pre-order, you will never be able to read the missing chapter that the writers claim is only a side story anyway (Or, like in Mass Effect 3, it might be a major character from the plot) and there’s no cover on the book because you didn’t pay up front.
That’s the LEAST stupid pre-order garbage. It actually gets a lot worse than that with games. We wouldn’t allow this with a DVD of a movie, a book, or any sort of physical product we buy, why is it ok to do it with games?
I don’t care about that to be honest. Most pre-order bonuses don’t often change your experience. And if they do it’s not like they matter.
exclusives/timed exclusives for games on certain consoles annoy me more to be honest.
Wow Ubi….No just no….
So this is Ubi’s reply to the growing dislike of their practices? Gamings version of free steak knives?
Did they hire Satan as their new marketing manager?!
not to defend Ubisoft here but people will lap this shit up. And it’s only going to get worse.
Yeah I know, there’s always people who buy it :S
I bet half the people complaining on Youtube already pre-ordered
It sounds like 2001 movie commercial. Very bad!
Oh Ubisoft you funny, you should know that i never buy your Assassins Creed games new, pre owned all the way.
Oh and i hope a female wins the trip to there studio in Montreal and gives them shit for not having an option to have a female assassin protagonist.
* Open to male US residents only. We don’t hate women, it would just have been too hard to include prizes they’d want.
I have to break my “Pre-ordering is and always has been for morons” rule because of the tangible reward that is the Destiny Beta. I’d do weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil stuff to get another hit of it after the Alpha.
“with so many ways to win, what have you got to lose?” like $80 and my time
I thought it was pretty cool myself.
I honestly think this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard for marketing a game, especially from a big game studio with a decent IPs. This reeks of some two bit operation desperate to get sales so they don’t go under or before everyone realises their game is a buggy mess. This is not the sort of thing I expect a big studio to be doing.
Also I can cancel a Pre-order at any time so what’s to stop me getting the code and cancelling it and enjoying any free stuff I win? (Yes I’m aware it’s US only but surely I’m not the only guy to think of this.)
Okay at the risk of having an unpopular idea, I’m going to say that I don’t know why this is such a big deal. Note that I rarely preorder, I just don’t get the hate.
If you don’t want to preorder, don’t do it. But for people who do pre-order anyway this wouldn’t be stupid at all.
Ubisoft is a business and preorders help that business. They’re obviously going to try to encourage preordering, and of the things they could offer to do so this is relatively mild.
At the end of the day you get your game either way and if you want to preorder you might get some extra stuff. To each their own.
pre-ordering a game is a bit of a strange concept.
would you pre-order a movie?
to me, pre-ordering should be something more like kickstarter. “I’ll pay for this game so you can make it good”
Instead, it ends up being “they already paid for this game, who cares if we make it good or not”
I think the greater issue here is per-ordering in general is hurting the industry. As for this specific example (I didn’t watch the video) incorporating chance and luck into a pre-order is just lazy money grabbing.
Why not give pre-orders something concrete and run a separate competition as part of your marketing?
It’s like the customers are directly paying for the marketing. Even before release.
PS I rarely pre-order and was burnt the last few times so I won’t be preordering ever again. I’m not into the collectors editions or anything like that. It makes sense to pre-order a physical object that is in limited supply. Makes no sense for a digital download
I’m not arguing with it but I’m genuinely curious as to how preorders hurt the industry
Well it depends how far in advance you pre-order. This is all speculation as I don’t have any data to back my opinion (though I’m sure it exists).
If you pre-order a game a year in advance (most AAA games seem to announce about that far ahead), then you are ordering a trailer. You’re ordering something that’s only half finished. For the most part you’re ordering it for no particular reason.
If a pre-order provides some sort of tangible benefit, like and art book for example, then I have no problem.
If it provides a new skin or different weapon, then it’s a pretty lazy way of carrying out market analysis. EG – “we have 5 mil pre-orders and we expect that makes up 30% of sales so we will easily reach our target of 15 mil sales”. The problem with this mentality is that once they’ve sold enough there is little incentive to complete, polish and fix the game.
If they had to wait till release or after industry reviews of the game to get their sales figures, they’d be far more focused on delivering a quality product.
If you pre-order a week in advance, it’s probably not a big deal. They game isn’t going to change much and you already have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting.
In general I think people shouldn’t pre-order games well in advance, especially if the carrot is just a skin change or an in game badge that means nothing and cost the developer nothing to provide.
I’ll take “vendor exclusive content” for $500.
I suppose haha. But to me that seems more like content they created for preorder, not content they removed to use for preorder. So IMO, generally not a big loss.
We used to get weird little bonuses in games hidden behind the necessity to be good or adventurous enough to find them. Now we get them automatically, as long as we pay for it and only buy from this guy but not that guy. It’s not a great loss, but it’s still something we used to get for free being surgically removed and used as a carrot to support bad business practices. Oh and they charge us for the privilege of supporting their anti-consumer practices… can’t forget that.
The pre-order thing is becoming a joke !
I went into EB Games on the weekend to buy a Wii remote and was asked if I wanted to pre order any games announced at E3 , when I said no just the wii remote he pulled out a sheet of Wii games and insisted I re-thought about pre ordering.
These companies will get my money when they produce the final completed product , not a buggy version of what should have been.
EB have started to really hound people when it comes to cross selling. I suspect it’s part of their KPIs or they get some sort of bonuses for each pre-order. Something is obviously pushing them to do it.
Yeah I actually got an email survey a day after and on question asked if I had been spoken to about pre orders , So it obviously has come from above.
Still a pain in the arse cause I never pre order and no amount of stupid in game rewards will cause me to do so.
I pre-order if it’s something that will likely sell out. Like actual limited collector’s editions. With them if you ever change your mind before it comes out you can always cancel, otherwise you may miss out if you’re keen on it.
Def KPIs.
I used to work there, and yes, it’s all about the KPI’s. Its a % of sales as pre-orders, basically.
The harrassment at EB for awhile (at least 2 years)… and that’s why I tend to go to JB Hi-Fi these days. It’s my 1 hour lunch break so I don’t want to lose an extra 10 minutes of that because of your company’s business plans.
Does that say you can actually win the studio itself? Ubi must be falling on hard times.
people need to stop pre-ordering games. That’s literally the only thing that will stop this kind of bullshit.
This is why I dislike Ubisoft and their shallow games.
I’m sure somebody will tell you that they’ve improved since AC1 but I never bought another one of their titles after that.