Far Cry 6 emails you as if the villian is taunting you. Is this too much.

Normally I wouldn't care, but the tone combined with the fact that the game has expensive microtransactions make it feel pretty scummy. If it had been a chart of all players' total playtime etc and posted on their twitter it wouldn't have felt as egregious as a 'personal' e-mail.

From what I saw it just looked kinda lame, I get enough email I don't care about on a daily basis.

As far as email or other communication as a game mechanic, there was a game that did that back in the day called Majestic. It was before my time and was long shut down by the time I discovered it, but it seemed like a really cool idea that I wish someone else would try again.

In the small scale it doesn't really matter. In a broader context it's a bit fucked up. They already got you to buy the game. You already spend your money. Now they want to drive "engagement" so that they can continue to get money if you inevitably buy one of the many microtransactions they have. Or any future dlc. It's just feels sleazy.

seems like something Kojima would have done first, back in his heyday. but it wouldn't have been as lame.

It's not an invasion of privacy because you agree to receiving their promotional emails somewhere in the web of agreements games make you check nowadays. Ubisoft aren't the first to send these sorts of player retention emails and the certainly won't be the last.

That being said, it feels completely transparent when it concerns a single player game that the intention is to get you back in to potentially sell more microtransactions to you and the way they worded the email is terrible! Maybe generate flavour without talking down to your consumers as if they have nothing better to do than play your weird game.

In the end it's just another email that I can ignore but that's mostly coming from a position of being inured to spam in 2021. Spam is still bad! It doesn't become less bad when a video game company does it!

Even the less sodium version of Spam is still too salty!!

It would have been cool 20 years ago but now i need to try and use e-mail for important things when i'm not dodging infinite amounts of spam and phishing, so i'd be more annoyed than anything.

Also "Hahaaa i'm in your real life e-mail now be afraid!! © 2021 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved." is more than a little silly.

It's not an invasion of privacy because they aren't actually harvesting any information except your email address, which you've given them. If you ticket the "don't send me promotional emails" box or whatever it's very annoying and bad, but it's not some serious breach like so many companies that actually harvest your data for various nefarious purposes. How many apps want access to your photos or your location data for no actual reason, or want it for some legitimate reason (like using location data for a weather app) but then use it for other things?

On the other hand...this would absolutely piss me off and make me less likely to go back to the game. I play video games to escape the real world not to be nagged and bothered, and I don't want some fictional game villain bugging me in real life. It's just irritating.

The difference between this and something like Majestic is that with Majestic you intentionally signed up to play an AR game and you knew what was coming. This is more the equivalent of when you have a customer service call and they call you back later to do an automated survey on the customer service provided. It's annoying!

I've played a lot of MMOs and all of them do this shit if you lapse your sub for a goddamn minute. It's annoying but whatever I'm used to just ignoring them.

I remember The Old Republic doing this, framing the emails as, "Your companion misses you!"

Considering that the agreement to this stuff is usually hidden in a wall of legal document text, to purposefully get people not to read it, and not agreeing to it can have the potential of cutting off access to a part, or all of, a video game, I'd say using all of the data they're getting from you to hassle you into playing their shitty video game is still an invasion of privacy.

While I don't think they're collecting any more data then any other shitty company that wants your data to play a damn video game, most companies aren't stupid enough to remind you just how much data they have on you for a meta joke.

I haven't gotten one even though I havent played since release week, which makes me think it's just tied to your email preferences, which means it's not different than all the other emails companies send.

It's just a marketing thing, that's it.

It's a marketing email, who cares

I think others have mentioned it, but I feel like I've been getting emails like this for years now. I don't really get the uproar over this specific example aside from it being Far Cry 6 and a blatant attempt to beg you to engage with it.

Right. Let's not pretend this is new or that it only happens in video games, even though it's upsetting that the practice is so common we've become desensitized to it. This is in the same vein as the "No, I don't want to subscribe to your awesome products because I'm a weak baby loser" negging options that show up these days.

I'm of the belief any concerns about engagement should be restricted to the game itself. If you have to try to pull players back in from outside of the game, chances are you already lost them. But if your goal is to be a sleazy freemium game developer and catch the one "whale" out of every thousand emails sent, then this is the disgusting but logical strategy for doing so. To be fair, Far Cry 6 does this even if you're playing the game regularly: the villain's message just changes from "Where you at, beeotch?" to "Grr! I'll get you next time, rebel!"

But I've found the in-game reflections of player engagement to be infinitely more... well, engaging. Your Animal Crossing town turns to shit if you don't maintain it. This isn't a new or unique mechanic, even if you replace it with outposts getting recaptured or sections of the galaxy falling under Reaper control. On the other hand, having Psycho Mantis read your memory card or The End die from old age was a vastly more creative way to break the fourth wall, but now I'm praising Kojima so I need to stop typing.

It’s annoying, and marketing being annoying sucks ass. That qualifies as “too much” for me. If I have limited time to play anything and a ton of interesting games are available, nagging me to prioritize your game is a surefire way to dump it off my to-do list. Can’t speak to its invasiveness but it reeks of desperation in a way I personally find offputting.

They're called ARGs - Alternate Reality Games - and they're pretty common nowadays.

Not in the slightest. If they started doing it weekly then yes it would be obnoxious. But a single email I think is a funny joke and kinda witty. Its an email. Ignore it and move on if it bothers you that much, which it shouldn't. Buncha softies lol. And ONE time is not nagging. And you already bought the damn thing so its not like you didn't intend to play it. At launch no less.

Imagine being so sensitive that a marketing email sends you into a tizzy. Also you literally have to opt-in to these emails.

I want to get exactly zero amount of unsolicited marketing communications from companies. There are times when I want to play a game and times when I don't want to play a game because I've got something more important to do, and I want games to respect these boundaries. The few times that I've downloaded a mobile game and forgotten to immediately turn off the notifications just reminds me of how terrible this practice is. "Hey stop spending time with your family because our game has a thing". You can tell me about the thing when and if I log in to the game, and that's it.

As a one-off thing I admit that it is a little cute but if we allow this then every game is going to start doing it, and companies are very good at making getting off mailing lists to be as difficult as possible. As an example there are a few shops that seem to override my mailing preferences every time I buy something from them.

It's one more spammail to ignore, so i doubt i'd even see the contents, but i do think it's pretty silly that such things apparently work. I can sort of imagine that you forgot you started a game and then just didn't get back to it and that a reminder might direct you back to that game. But the idea that someone might look at this mail and think 'oh god, i only killed 1864 enemies.. and the enemy is taunting me... I really need to go back in there and up my kills, this is embarrassing!'. That's quite something. But apparently that's an effective motivator.

Next step is to compare your stats with your Ubi friends list and shame you for not playing as much as your friends? 'You're falling behind in levels! Keep up or you won't be ready to join them in the next raid!'

i mean, it's a slightly different context...

...but i recently had a technical apparel brand i really like email me with a fake HUMAN CUSTOMER SUCCESS ASSOCIATE stating that i had left some items in my cart and asking if i needed any assistance to complete the transaction.

this was 100% an unsolicited interaction, and they had to have used some tracking data to identify it was specifically me with my specific email address that was cruising their site

...and it skeeved me way the fuck out. i still like the products, but there's a pretty negative association burned into my brain forever now.

I think it's kind of funny as a one off but not something I would like on a consistent basis. I like to have a gap between real life and fantasy.

Seems kinda lame, but y'know, whatever. I wonder if anybody's grandparent got this and thought it was real...

who cares, it's silly anyone would be offended/bothered by it - if you use your primary email account for junk like Ubisoft or other game companies that will always bombard you with crap, it's kinda on you.

I'm pretty sure Ubisoft sent me an e-mail when I was playing one of the Assassin's Creed games, telling me how many people I had killed. Can't find it now. I thought that was cool (but why don't they show the stats in-game?) I've also received congratulatory e-mails from Playstation after completing some of their first party games. So, this Far Cry thing doesn't bother me at all. If you didn't like the game enough to continue playing, this e-mail wouldn't make you go back. And if you're still playing and also got one of these, you would've continued playing anyway. Glance at it, delete it, move on.