Activision says gross Call of Duty loadout screen ads were only a test that was added “in error”, but it doesn’t excuse how vile that test is
Activision says gross Call of Duty loadout screen ads were only a test that was added “in error”, but it doesn’t excuse how vile that test is
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It was a test. Testing how the players would react to ads thrown at them.
“in error” .. rofl.
I love how every time a publisher gets shit for some scummy behavior, they always claim it was an accident or just a test.
They lost the plot when the second you opened any of their previous games you were immediately hit with a full screen ad you could tab thru. If people wanna spend money they’ll visit the store tab themselves.
How can it be “in error” if it was a test?
“In error,” as in “Shit you weren’t supposed to see that!” or “Since your all complaining, it was actually an error!”
“Oh, those loading screen ads? They were just a joke, bro. A goof. It’s not like we would ever do that for real. Heh heh.”
a few days ago I saw the newest CoD was on sale for $40, and having not played in quite a few years I was really tempted….
now, not so much.
Oopsies!
Bullshit.
‘Oops one of our interns spilled coffee on the keyboard and chat GPT designed ads in the loading screen and pushed it to prod’
No it didn’t, it wasn’t an accident, fuck the fuck off.
ngl if i opened the change loadout screen to an ad, it wouldn’t even phase me at this point. the game opens an ad the moment you open it, shoves the battle pass in your face, then reminds you to spend cod points every chance it gets.
There was no error. It was 100% intentional.
The fact they were even testing something like that is unacceptable
They must think people are idiots, these fucks would try anything to squeeze more money out of people, cod is well and truly dead!
You can add something in error. But you can’t design it and develop it in error. People aren’t stupid.
UHhuh, sure, now that it’s exploding in their face it’s “only a test” and “in error”.
Yes, it’s a test. They’re testing how fare they can go before people stop buying. So far the test has been a success.
The test was to see players reactions and it would only be called “an error” if people hated it. Scummy technique.
Activision believes the people playing their games are stupid.
I mean, can you blame them when they put out products like this for top dollar, with microtransactions and people gobble it up and beg for more?
“I love the uneducated” – real quote from US history here.
Ah, Yes, “we accidentally paid a (probable) dozen people for (probably) over a week to manage, program, debug, and QA the addition of ads to our loading screens. And then we accidentally pushed that totally nothing but a test feature into the live version of the game. We totally didn’t intent to add that to our game. Except…. Maybe…? No no, we won’t!… Unless… We do? No no, it was all an error! We swear!”
They really do take people for morons, don’t they?
You cant add things in error lmao, how stupid do they think we are
Oh fuck off with that dumbass “oops” shit.
The same BS as always. They “test” something or claim it was “in error” and then 6 to 12 months down the road they’ll implement it and hope people don’t care and accept it.
They pray that the majority of people think “weren’t adverts introduced 6 months ago? I thought we’d already had them come into affect? What’s the big deal?” These companies pray that people misremember this “test” as being a full on thing so in a years time “it isn’t so bad right?”
Since when do any of these shops have an actual error? So many games launch in a buggy state but the one thing that works is always the shop. What a surprise.
If you think those money grubbing suits in ivory towers sitting around hand-carved mahogany tables are going to apologize for something they are 100% planning on implementing to make even more money, you’ve got another thing coming.
“O shit, I just tripped and wrote 600 lines of code for in-game ads by accident, my bad, tehee!”
“an error” ~ see also: ‘a bad idea’
Ads were always a pain in the ass, but now they are getting so god damn pervasive. Youtube is probably the worst offender. The app now will minimize the video from full screen to show an ad when you pause. It also frequently triggers ads when you interact with the video in any way. Pause, FF, Skip, adjust volume, etc since it knows you are paying attention and engaged.
I was trying to follow a build tutorial recently and it was the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had. Tried to pause to look at the details and the screen would minimize. Try to skip back to repeat an instruction and it would trigger an ad.
You can’t just “accidentally” develop a UI for something like this.
They’re slowly grinding gamers down. This was just the initial test to gauge the reaction. They’ll do it more subtly next time, once the outrage dies out. Or maybe they’ll be blatant about it; it doesn’t matter. CoD players will get used to it either way. Then more games will start doing in-game ads once it’s been normalized.
Look how they took (good looking) cosmetics out of most games and started charging for them. That’s considered normal now. How long do you think it will be before we start seeing posts saying, “If you guys don’t want to see ads, are you willing to pay $100 per game? We need ads to keep the cost down.”
theyre taking them out now to bring them in later when people are too fatigued with it to make noise about it again. just like every unpopular change to ToS or even laws..
to be honest i would be less mad if they just came out and said “yeah we tried some stuff, and you guys seem to hate it, so we removed it again” instead of going “oh so sorry, it was an accident, it was never meant to be shown to the players” and similar BS excuses..
« Woops, we happened to code an entire function with clickable links, it went through dozens of verifications, translated into 20+ languages, haha how silly »
They pulled an Ubisoft claiming those intrusive in game adds are a mistake.
Bullshit.
Yeah they were testing how bad the reaction was.
It was a test and you all failed
I hope they got good data from their test: we don’t want them and are willing to walk.
Who is still playing the serialized, annualized, collectathon garbage that is COD these days?
Yeah a test to see if we’d tolerate the bullshit. Just like a toddler pushing to see how much they can get away with.
They say this every single time. Every time. “Oh, you didn’t like that? Uhhhh, that was a mistake, just a test, we wuz just foolin'”
Certainly was a test, to see if they’d get away with it or not.
There’s been at least a dozen of these “tests” that were done in error across multiple games and publishers.
No one wants more advertisements in their game, but I just read that article and it states that the ads were for cosmetics for the same game? Whats the problem here.
You don’t just write the hundreds of lines of code to get those ads to display on the loadout screen by accident.
There were project managers, tech leads, and several other higher ups that would have signed off on something like this even being developed in the first place.