Ubisoft pulls advertising from X

Skull and Bones has a new release date. Really. Ubisoft revealed that the upcoming pirate MMO is set to raise anchor on February 16th, 2024. There’s a new trailer, and even a deep dive into closed beta, which continues in a new test next week.

The official GTA 6 trailer upload from Rockstar Games is sitting at over 110 million views at the time of writing, and it's set multiple new world records along the way. Guinness World Records has officially recognised three world records set by the GTA 6 trailer, covering its first 24 hours of availability, likes, and views outside of the video game sphere.

Pacific Drive is set to rev up its engines and pull out of the driveway on 22nd February, across PlayStation 5 and PC (via Steam and Epic Game Store).

Widespread derision from the Destiny 2 community over the contents of a new $15 Starter Pack has led Bungie to remove the pack from the Steam store. 

Just one day after the launch of Season of the Wish, Bungie has removed a $15 "starter pack" microtransaction for Destiny 2 that quickly became the subject of criticism and backlash over pay-to-win concerns.

For years, Ubisoft has had one, single job: Not releasing Beyond Good and Evil games. To its credit, it's done the work with aplomb for a good long while now. Sure, sometimes we'll get some fanciful BG&E 2 trailer, a LinkedIn bio will change, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt will appear, but the studio's fundamental principle of not releasing a game in this series has never wavered.

Ubisoft is still to officially confirm the Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition, but people are now playing the game after an apparent slip-up saw it briefly available via subscription service Ubisoft+.

There's a certain kind of scam, old as time, that revolves around selling people something that tells them to sell the same thing. That's not how it's presented, of course. The pitch is that if only you knew X (my secret knowledge) you would easily have Y (money, young lovers, cars). Perhaps the most egregious contemporary example of this kind of grift is Andrew Tate and his «Hustlers University», but there are a million of them out there, and the internet has just turned up an example of what the future for this particular hustle looks like. Take a bow Jake Ward, not only the latest guy who wants to make money by selling you a pipe dream but a pioneering example of an AI scammer. Mr. Ward's modus operandi is simple. Creating content is hard. So why not just use AI to steal it? This isn't even me putting words in his mouth: Ward is flagrantly open about what he's proposing, calling it a «heist» in some vain effort to make it seem daring and sexy rather than theft. «We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor,» said Ward on X. «We got 489,509 traffic in October alone.» Half a million clicks isn't anywhere near what a major site would pull in a month, but it is a considerable amount of traffic nevertheless: and certainly of a scale where you could be selling a lot of ads. And Ward did it by using AI to rip-off an unnamed competitor's content. Ward's company is registered in the UK as Content Growth, which is certainly a nice euphemism, and the methodology is as brazenly unapologetic as you get. Ward says that he: «1. Exported a competitor’s sitemap 2. Turned their list of URLs into article titles 3. Created 1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI 18 months later, we have stolen: — 3.6M total traffic — 490K monthly traffic»

After developing social media apps like TikTok, ByteDance made a big push into the gaming market with its Nuverse brand. Now the company may be reversing course. 

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, the game about a brother-sister duo who commit murders for fun and profit on the streets of London amidst the bustle and furor of the Industrial Revolution, is free to keep from the Ubisoft Store, as long as you grab it before December 6.

First reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, console players of older Assassin's Creed games like Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla encountered Black Friday ad pop-ups for the latest entry, Assassin's Creed Mirage, while trying to access in-game menus. Ubisoft has since stated that the ads appeared due to a «technical error» and removed them.

Ubisoft has released a statement regarding players reporting that Assassin’s Creed games have started displaying advertisements for Ubisoft’s Black Friday sale. The company has taken to social media platform X to release its statement, referring to the ads being shown in games as a “technical error”, echoing an earlier statement released to The Verge.