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Ubisoft Hands Out Nexus 7 Tablets At a Game's Press Event
An anonymous reader writes "With Watch Dogs launching next month, Ubisoft is ramping up the promotion. That includes holding press events to show off the game to journalists, many of whom will end up reviewing Watch Dogs. One such event was held last week in Paris, and it has been revealed by attendees that Ubisoft decided to give everyone who turned up a Nexus 7 tablet. Why? That hasn't been explained yet, but in a statement on Twitter, Ubisoft said such gifts were 'not in line with their PR policies.' You can see how it would be viewed with skepticism; after all, these are the individuals who will give Watch Dogs a review score, which many gamers rely on to help them make a purchasing decision."
...it would have been more shocking if they hadn't been doling out swag bags to their press events.
This is news?
What the..Oof! Ow! Ouch! Merde! Zut Alors! Sonova..Oh, nice one.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The tablets are going film you, and put you on the net.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
We're talking about it and thinking about it, aren't we? The game is about hacking personal devices and the failed attempts at retaining privacy in the digital age. At the event they hand you a device pretty similar to one in the game. Maybe you even heard on the news how the NSA can tap your phone quite easily. And people willingly give their information away because the service is free.
I'd say the choice of promotional swag is right on the money. Unfortunately it looks like bribery.
And all I got was this stupid lanyard.
Ahh well, at least it's something. Although I'm amazed that the various companies there don't do something more substantial that would actually help their sales. One example I've rarely seen there is giving out a coupon for a decent discount off the retail price of the game. To the person interested in the game, it's worth, say $20 cash in hand. To someone lukewarm on the game, a lower price might encourage a purchase. And to the cheapskates pirating it, well, they're not your customers, are they?
For the rest, they never went to the booth to start with.
Heck, I saw Bethesda giving our messenger bags for playing Wolfenstein. I shouldn't complain because that's awesome, but in the end, it's also kind of silly since a number of people just waited in line to get a free bag and really, really don't care about the game at all.
How long until you can put a dollar into a vending machine and get a computer when you need one?
Watch Dogs is supposed to allow interaction between smarphones / tablet app users and console / PC players. (i.e., the police helicopter following you is flown by a smartphone user, not AI, etc.). I assume they had the app pre-loaded on those tablets, no? So still kind of sketchy, but not totally unreasonable.
I predict a sucky game.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's intresting the people attending the press event had to sign a NDA and when it came out that press got a goodie bag with a tablet in there Ubisoft quickly says "its not sanctioned".
To me it looks like saving face because 20.000 dollar worth of tablets have to be vetted somewhere in the chain.
Also remember a couple of weeks ago when ubi got caught with doctoring images and they replied with "well those images where the vision of what we had not actual game play" but at the time they where saying it was game play.
Ubi shows it's shady business practices again.
thanks , will avoid all ubisoft games from here on.
This is the only game I really care about right now: Planetary Annihilation.
There are others, but really, nothing else matters to me besides my own experiments. I really tried to care about some 1st world problems concerning about who got what tablet that will be burning in a waste pile in Ghana in two years, but I just really couldn't bring myself to do so. I mean, don't get me wrong. I can love me some games, but I just can't give a flying fuck about who got what data on which Starfleet PADD.
Know what I do care about on games.slashdot.org? Actual games. It's in the subdomain, damnit. This isn't reviews.accountability.tard, we all know journalistic integrity in game reviews does not exist (seriously, if you don't give them at least a 7 (or 6 at the worst) then you don't get a review copy of the next game and everyone else scoops you). SO FUCKING WHAT. I don't go to theaters based on movie reviews. I don't go to museums based on art critics reviews. I don't play games based on advertising either. What's the big deal?
I suppose next you'll be whining about how the mainstream news is just a bunch of filtered statist propaganda messages? No, that's decades old not news, you dorks. We know the slant is there. The real news would be if there were some form of actual integrity springing up in game journalism.
nm
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
The game will be bad, or is being completely oversold.
I'm trying to think of a case where this level of PR blitz/buying people off has ever resulted in a truly "good" game.
From TFS: "You can see how it would be viewed with skepticism; after all, these are the individuals who will give Watch Dogs a review score, which many gamers rely on to help them make a purchasing decision."
Come on, we're all adults here. We all know the industry gives perks to reviewers in exchange for favorable reviews. This is just more blatant than most.
While I love my Nexus 4 and especially the, now discontinued, Nexus 10, the 7 is a piece of junk, IMO. I run the same software on all of them (actually, less on the 7), and I have to charge it as often as the 4, which I use far more and is also receiving a cell signal.
The 10 is pretty sweet though. I can get almost two weeks, as compared to one/two days from the 7, with similar usage. I've wanted to throw the thing away myself. I don't blame Ubisoft.
This time, however, the demo concluded with a demonstration of a real-time iPad app that supports a kind of meta-game - much in the manner of Microsoft's Xbox SmartGlass.
Here players were presented with a wireframe map of futuristic Chicago, drawn in a similar style to the one that used in the press conference demo. The map can be scrolled and zoomed, with pop-up boxes and icons providing real-time information about the game in progress.
"As we said, everything is connected - and we've extended that to mobile devices," said the Ubisoft demonstrator. "We have Chicago in the palm of your hand. Everything that you've seen in the game will be accessible, so different shops - pharmacies, gun shops - will also be available here. You can see everything."
I figured it out. All Ubisoft games are underbudgeted, glitchy DRM shitstorms so they gave them tablets to enter the rating immediately upon arriving since it was a foregone conclusion.
Here is more complete coverage (in french, since Ubisoft is a french company and the event was in Paris, but you will manage to translate)
In short, the Ubisoft person responsible for British PR decided to offer tablets to British journalists. No-brits had nothing, which suggests this is indeed an individual move
I always knew IGN was bribed for their reviews and even made a point of underrating great games from companies that didn't pay the review tax (bribe).
But this is absurd. So open and blatant about it.
At least hide it and lie to me and do so convincingly.
I don't hate being lied to nor do I hate corruption. I hate being lied to poorly and blatant in-your-face corruption.
Giving away Nexus 7's seems hard to explain away. I mean, I tried to think of any reason why they might have wanted to give them all 7" Android tablets, like maybe an interesting way of distributing a multimedia press kit or something, but that could have just as easily been handled by $75 Chinese-made Android tablets.
That did make me think that that'd be pretty cool though; imagine buying a bunch of modestly-spec'd 7" Android tablets from China wholesale, and using them as giveaway items to distribute really dynamite multimedia presentations.
I actually picked up FOUR 7" Android 4.x tablets from DealExtreme for ~$35 each last year, during a half-price sale...and I doubt they'd let even such a sale as that rob them entirely of profits... So I imagine if you're a company buying tablets like that wholesale, you can get some pretty sweet deals, AND get them all custom-branded.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Maybe it's a cunning plan to get reviewers to forget to mention the UPlay piece of shit.
Woe betide any outfit which angers a games publisher. All that free shit, exclusives and the advertising will be pulled in an instant. The journo and the site will be blackballed and will have to wait outside the tent like everyone else.
Which is why people with an ounce of sense and self restraint wait for a game to be released and for a general concensus to form before making a purchase. Don't believe exclusive reviews, don't believe some bloggers pants wetting hyperbole after their all expenses paid jolly, don't trust a site which is festooned with ads for the game being reviewed. If a game is THAT GOOD, then it'll still be THAT GOOD a week or two down the line.