Can we boycot the companies that do this already. I get the AC IP is nice, I’ve certainly enjoyed my fair share of their games.
But the ad industry is completely getting derailed. What’s next ? Watch a 15s promo video every time you want to open te fridge? Watch a promo video before you can open the door?
Have your walls randomly show you ads?
Stop buying their shit. Regardless of how decent the game is. Punish them for the predatory practices. Demand refunds.
But no. People will likely be outraged, and then next game angry and then the next game they’ll suck it all up and complain about the good all days.
#remindmein5years
I always thought the cyberpunk genre was a warning, not a blueprint.
Stop buying their shit.
Way ahead of you.
Companies should focus on making in-game advertising appear ‘diegetic’ as opposed to the low hanging fruit of inserting it like a sore thumb.
Had Ubisoft scattered a number of graffiti or town criers in Odyssey’s cities talking about visiting a foreign land for less money the next few days only, where the art direction looked and felt perfectly at home in the world itself and interacting with the hooks alerted users to the promotion details, this would have been way less disgusting to players.
You didn’t have players revolting when Cyberpunk’s 2.0 update suddenly had characters talking about Dogtown which then hooked into trying to upsell the DLC. It fit the world and was something that could be ignored or engaged with as desired.
GTA: Online’s phone calls hooking into paid or new content are another example of doing it better (though their frequency is tuned really poorly).
The problem is most publishers don’t want to spend the extra time and money to fit ads into the worlds players are in. Which is dumb, as testing a really terrible UX that players will revolt on and press will cover negatively is going to shoot in the foot an initiative that would have gone much smoother with a bit of elbow grease and respect for the players.
Especially with the increase in in-game commerce I expect that we will see a spike in in-game advertising over the next few years, and with advances in generative AI that might even end up being tailored to the in game world as well much more often.
But the reactivity of the audience here means that the publishers who do a good job on limiting the degree to which moving in that direction abuses the playerbase are going to end up much better off than the ones that think dumb shit like a popup ad in the game UI during play is a good idea.
I have a hard unbreakable rule:
Free, you can serve me ads, I’ll try to avoid them but ok. But the minute I pay for something and you try to give me ads on top, we’re gonna have a problem.
Newspapers. You paid for it, and it still got ads.
I know, digital and printed ads are different.
Cable TV, same thing. This is just old media execs trying to “bring back the magic” or new media execs thinking that old media techniques will work
Apparently when cable first came to be, there were no ads
Probably the same case for newspapers, radio, the internet, movies in theatres, gas station pumps etc. Though each new medium we create has a shorter and shorter Time-To-Ad-Platform runway it seems
The first cable TV system in the U.S. was built in the late 1940s and had ads from day one since it was created to bring network television to communities with poor reception. Cable has always had ads.
Newspapers. You paid for it, and it still got ads.
I have never done this and I doubt I ever will.
I’m in my 40s. The last time I can remember buying a newspaper, was when I did it for my parents as a kid 🤷
My parents might have handed me some change to operate the box of newspapers outside the grocery store when I was three or four so I could try opening it. But I’m not even sure if I got to do that.
Newspapers are a long metro ride thing for me. Just never got the hang of smartphones, not in that way that is. Also the interaction is different, and I don’t mean the physical aspects but the way you browse through something with a) a finite amount of information and b) with very few (if any) links. A physical paper comes with an included progress bar. You know, sense of pride and accomplishment and all.
I’d love to buy and read newspaper. Really do. And I don’t even have to commute. But newspaper here are just trash. It’s all about which celebrity cheated who with whom, political propaganda, garbage about crime and some other things. Rarely anything interesting. So I just skip.
How old are you?
30
Same, and I have bought some before, for different reasons that I don’t even remember lol, but yeah, I wouldn’t buy one just to read it now lol.
I mean sure, but it’s also been literally a decade since I bought a newspaper.
I bought it for the coupons.
This is why Amazon Prime was an instant cancel.
If you still want to watch amazon video content, you can stream pretty much anything for free here: https://fmoviesz.to/
Just make sure you have Adnauseam or uBlock Origin installed.
I just started watching the 2nd season of Invincible :)
look up cloudstream and thank me later
That’s cable TV in a nutshell. Pay to watch ads.
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Ah, my hard line stance of “never buy anything ubisoft” is still working out for me.
Ubisoft, epic, ea, Blizzard/Activision…
I wont say Bethesda because I’m hoping for another Doom or Quake.
_EA is the fucking devil. They bought my favorite game, Ultima Online, and ruined it. _
That’s tragic and I feel your pain.
I’m glad that game had such a community surge of custom shards to keep it going, but it sure fractured the community. :(
get in line. ubisoft is the same by the way. they own the rights to my favorite IPs: prince of persia and flashback and all they’re doing is releasing shovelware.
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The way that Bethesda has handled Doom has been nothing short of excellent. Hopefully they continue to support Id however they need it to keep on making great games.
Generally, yeah. The way they worked with Mick Gordon last game was awful though.
I didn’t know about that whole fiasco. At least the end product was good. I feel bad for Mick Gordon though. I’m even more impressed that he did so well despite having to deal with that nonsense.
If you didn’t say it I was gonna.
Well Doom 2016 at least. Doom Eternal fucked over Mick Gordon and DLCfyied the game. The cracks are forming.
Can’t complain about the quake update.
What’s the problem with Epic Games, besides No Tux no Bux and anti cheat rootkits?
I mean those suck, but it has to be more than that right?
Delisting and shutting down the Unreal and Unreal Tournament games. General lootbox bs.
Talk about forgetting your roots…
Delisting the single player games that don’t require a master server to be maintained was just salt in the wound.
Owned in part by Tencent
They haven’t made a decent game in 15 years so…there’s that.
I would a very happy person if most things in this World that reliably make one feel as “I’m doing the right thing” and frequently make one “Give oneself a pat on the back” required so little expense, time and effort as “never buy anything from Ubisoft”.
It’s like winning the “well done dude” lotery once every couple of months without spending a cent.
Ah, my hardline stance of “don’t buy profitable products you can get for free” is still working out for me.
Always testing the line… This wasn’t a mistake. They know you’ll be upset, they are testing HOW upset and then they’ll make their decision.
If you’re “upset” but buy another Ubisoft game anyway, then you weren’t that upset --> Ubisoft will keep doing it.
(you as in generic you)
Ubisoft doesn’t give a shit. Never did. They are the ones who added booster packs after certain time in game so you can progress at a normal pace instead if you pay them extra. Am actually surprised someone reacted this time since usually they are fiendishly defended by dedicated fans.
They don’t give a shit but if everyone rejects their bulshit, like that NFT nonsense, they will back off (and try again later)
True. And it usually works or at least to a degree, otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it.
Something you’re paying for should be completely ad free, period.
I wish that’s how the world worked, unfortunately it’s not
The World worked that way, but people accepted the new ad contained products they paid for.
People even think it is fine to buy a product you don’t own
And people are making excuses for the forever inflating greed…
I mean, how do you accept inflating prices and costs while your salary has been stagnant for decades?
It just doesn’t make sense how costs, on individuals, are growing and growing.I don’t I just pay the same amount since I was born /s
And get less and less for the same payment :p
It does work like that. You vote with your dollars. If you buy these companies’ products, you confirm they made the right decision.
If enough people abandon their products, they change the model or die.
What you say you like and what your dollars say you like are 2 different things. The sooner people realize this the faster things will improve. But, if people are unwilling to avoid buying products from bad companies, things will get worse. Welcome to capitalism.
Unfortunately you’re not quite right with this one. As an individual, me choosing not to buy a new Samsung TV which has ads on the menu isn’t going to directly effect the sales and/or profit of the model to any measurable significant margin. Especially if I was going to buy LG anyway.
If the entire population was able to communicate as one hive mind and apply your utopian strategy it would work, but unfortunately its exceptionally difficult to convince that amount of people.
This is the exact same concept and difficulty behind battling climate change (not buying and doing things which hurt the environment)
Yes I agree capitalism is … Well… Capitalism 🤣
You don’t have to be a hive mind to make a difference. Everyone gets one vote (or one bank account) to make things better or worse, even if it is only a very small amount. You can contribute to the society you want or the society that is convenient. Sometimes you have to sacrifice comfort (or entertainment) to influence the things you want society to be. If enough people agree, things get better. If you are just bitching about how you are being taken advantage of but willingly allow it to happen… c’est la vie…
Society is a collection of individuals. If enough people buy into the “1 person can’t change things” then everyone makes things worse a little but at a time. Buy what you want, vote how you want, but you are making things better or worse with every choice you make.
It would if everybody votes with their wallet.
They do. That’s the problem.
I like to compare that argument to climate change. If everyone voted with their wallet to not buy/do things which are bad for the environment we would stop climate change over night.
Now think about how impossible that is and then remember, that collective effort is just as difficult as stopping people buying things which contain ads
No it wouldn’t. Corpos would just put in more effort to hide the damage. Climate change can’t be stopped by individual consumers because they have no means to verify whether a product they want to buy hurts the environment.
There are products which you can guarantee have a major negative effect on the environment yet people still purchase them. This is exactly the same as people buying games and products with ads baked in.
Unless it’s a billboard!
I pay for my phone and my phone and my internet access. What gives?
This, but unironically.
If I had the means to pirate my internet connection, I’d do it in a heart beat.
Oh absolutely. I used to get free data on a blackberry I had, and it was great. Free YouTube all day!
Enshittification infects all.
I think we can stop this one at least
E: word
This is what I thought when micro transactions in paid games started around 10 years ago. I was wrong.
Ubi will pull the classic pretwnt it was an accident, then in two years slowly roll it out. People will kick and scream, but still buy their shit. Then it’ll become normalized and slowly get worse. Next gen of kids growing up used to this won’t know what the big deal is when we complain.
Same cycle over and over with all kinds of stuff over the past 20 years.
Fair AAA will always have a core demo who don’t care as long as their addiction is fed, but I think the fuss we raise should at least keep it out of the majority of games, and make people implementing it feel kind of scummy, so that’s something.
Like MTX are relegated to a very specific “type” of game which is instantly identifiable, and not that well regarded compared to more, uh, pure (?) games.
Summed up: ads and dark patterns will always work on a certain segment of the population, but they don’t necessarily get to be seen as normal or cool.
I don’t mind in-game ads printed on in-map billboards and stuff, but ads that interrupt gameplay? Fuck that. Especially if you’ve paid for the content.
I don’t mind in-game ads printed on in-map billboards and stuff
Not ten years ago people were complaining about this very thing.
It’s fascinating to watch the boiling frog in basically real time. Give it another 10 years and ads that interrupt gameplay will be seen as normal too.
10 years later…
I don’t mind ads that interrupt gameplay, but i hate when they require you to smile at your webcam and say “i love corporation!” and give two thumbs up. Other than that, the gameplay is monotinous enough to help me forget who i am and that the world is burning.
I dont mind it when it makes sense… Like ad boards in fifa games make sense…
But if it breaka immersion, then it’s stupid
or drinking a can of Monster Energy to replenish your health in death stranding…
/s
Its a Kojima game, it fits in and just amplifies the subliminal surrealism present in his games.
That one may be my favorite product placement in a game. It’s so absurd it becomes ironically funny
This kind of thing is a real artform, and I love it.
Making something so bad it gets good again, because people then understand it’s intentional.
Same for some visual effects in movies, or character traits, whatever. If it’s too subtle, it might be seen as out of place, an oversight or a straight up error. But if you over-exaggerate it, then it suddenly works.
Reading this back, I now have no idea if I explained my thought process in a way that gets my point across.
The coin-op Pole Position in 1982 had a number of regional ads on billboards along the track, including Pepsi and Marlboro, which was the first instance of product placement in a video game.
In 2007 a number of games featured sponsored product placement. Rainbow Six: Vegas had billboards with Comcast adverts, and a Comcast company kiosk in a convention center. Far Cry 2 (humorously) had Jeep vehicles, including a couple of civilian SUVs that were significantly more cushy than the rest of the vehicles in the game. The implication being the choice of PMCs and African warlords was not the flex Jeep hoped for.
In the 2010s, companies started renting billboards on their game levels for advertising that would be regularly updated, including a couple of Ubisoft’s MMO-lite titles. I think The Division 2 was one of them in which, again it was product placement. The annoyance was more that these were always-online games in which users had to be connected to the server even when they were playing single player, and the downloaded adverts only contributed to the awareness this wasn’t for the advantage of the players involved.
These days, there are some pretty serious reasons not to play Ubisoft games, from their overuse and misuse of microtransactions, and piecemeal marketing, to the extremely toxic work environment that continues to be a norm in Ubisoft offices, including the sexual harassment and coercion of attractive clerks and developers by the executive staff, for which there there wasn’t adequate disclosure or contrition by Ubisoft public relations.
I gave up Ubisoft games after 2020, and don’t even play the Ubisoft games I own (which might at some point cost me access to them, since I do not routinely sign onto Uplay or whatever it’s called now.
Drink verification can!
I remember seeing ads for real products in Need for Speed: Carbon (2006) and Cities XL (2009). I never really had a problem with diegetic ads that made sense (like on billboards). Interrupting gameplay to serve ads is going over the line.
To be fair trackmania where ubisoft implemented that is free2play. And you can deactivate it when you bought their subscription, the only issue is that it’s not sutomaticly deactivated once you buy ir
Am kind of torn on this. To some games, this adds level of realism. Racing games having brand names on billboards makes it feel more real. Folks at RockStar did awesome job with faking ads on radio, billboards, etc. But not every company has the resources to reinvent the whole world. Then again, seeing ads in some other type of game. No thanks.
Have you ever considered how much you lower your standards so people richer than you can be even richer at your expense?
Might want to stop doing that.
And they will get away with it because nobody does what will really hurt Ubisoft, which is NOT buy the games. No. They will simply come on reddit or here and complain, and then throw their hands up and accept it when that fails to produce any results.
I am a little slow - what exactly I am looking at here¿? Many of them seem to be playing modern warfare 2
It’s a Steam Group for an MW2 boycott, you’re seeing the members of that group and what they’re playing.
And then theres the one dude playing fucking half life 2 deathmatch.
I always found this to be a bad example. 15 people out of the 51 on that page are playing the game they’re in a boycott group for. That’s a clear minority, even if that had been representative of all 1557 members.
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It’s page one, so I don’t think this is a selected subset.
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This is just the people playing right now, and only people playing on steam. This doesn’t show all of the people who bought the game or are playing on console.
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Obviously none of the gaming boycotts have worked, and we’re both putting way too much thought into one image.
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Haven’t bought a ubisoft game in 10 years and I have missed nothing
That’s why those who “jUsT pAy PReMiUm” are at fault. These companies are just pushing the line to see what sticks, and you’re perpetuating it by paying
Yeah, it’s like all the useful idiots doing mental gymnastics to justify paying for youtube premium forget how subscription services like netflix and amazon routinely get worse over time.
Who says that? It’s not down to the people, you can’t control every individual as one hive mind. If you could climate change would stop overnight.
It’s corporate greed, ads will forever be interpolated into games and movies for the foreseeable future until it’s specifically outlawed to do so.
I’m sure given the opportunity as CEO the overwhelming majority of people on Lemmy would do the same for a bigger pay packet
I think it’s both. Corporate greed and people helping keep this up
Gamers continue to tell these companies that they’ll put up with anything while complaining online and continuing to purchase shitty games from shitty companies. Rinse and repeat.
This is 90% on consumers. Stop buying shit if you want change and I mean in any industry.
this is what companies want you to think. it’s like expecting drivers to be sensible so that we can reduce deaths from traffic accidents. it’s not a solution. we have traffic lights, seat belts, all sorts of security systems and regulations on car manufacturers (though not nearly enough).
consumer protection doesn’t happen by telling everyone to be sensible. regulation is needed.
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where did you get “don’t go outside” from?
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neither statement is true. we just talked about this.
And how are you going to convince, let’s see, something like 130 million people to just go along with that plan?
Do you actually want change or are you just bitching?
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And how do we get that, bud?
One congressperson at a time.
Hahahahahahahaha hahahahahah…
You got a better alternative, than pulling down your pants and bending over?
You think voting in a system built to keep those in power and those like the ones in power isn’t functioning exactly as intended? Are you 12? Grow up.
Are you 12? Grow up.
Noticed you’re not answering the question…
You got a better alternative, than pulling down your pants and bending over?
though not nearly enough)
Yes…there’s enough. There’s a reason a new car costs 30k. We don’t need radar, adaptive cruise, and fucking front facing cameras (yes, thats a real thing) standard.
I just want a heavy duty roll cage, a 200cc engine, and seat belts. All for 2k.
(The car safety standards are a sore point for me)
Gamers as a population really have to stop FOMO’ing into the newest games because their friends do.
Even if it’s blatantly obvious it’s going to be or is a bad game people still buy them because of the network effect.
90% on consumers? I don’t know I’d go that far… If a company is evil but provides a service people still desire, that doesn’t make the evil company being evil the fault of the consumers. Like saying gun control in America is resisted primarily by its citizens when we are well aware that company lobbying is mostly at fault and most citizens are actually for some amount of gun control.
Anyone who supports a company knowing how they conduct their business causes harm etc, is complicit. Once that information is learned a choice has to be made.
That only works if there’s meaningful competition. With megabrands like Nestle who make 1/4 of the grocery store, or game publishers like Ubisoft who receive 1/4 of the industry’s revenue any kind of boycott is dead before it begins.
In a society with a functioning government, megabrands who abuse their neighbors and/or customers would be hit with significant fines and be heavily regulated out of the bad behaviors, but the US hadn’t had a government interested in helping the common person for over half a century
I don’t disagree. I disagree with the idea that it’s 90% the fault of the consumer.
How is it not? We’re all to blame.
The consumer is 90% to blame for the actions of an international corporation who have analyzed and manipulated their target demographic? If it were a relationship you’d be victim blaming. If I hit you for being stupid, is it your fault because you were stupid or is it my fault for thinking hitting you was a solution?
Oh geeze… Ok, bud. You’re right. You’re the smartest. Nice work.
Way to shoehorn your opinions on gun control into a thread about forced ads in video games. If we ask nicely, will you share your thoughts about Trump as well?
He’s a cunt
he’s a cunt.
Weird how I said nothing about my personal opinion on gun control and only said that the primary force stopping gun control was arms lobbying.
Stop buying shit if you want change and I mean in any industry.
so we should boycott every industry out there?
yes
I mean, do you want things to change or do you just want to complain?
They said nothing about boycotting the industry. Buy games from good companies and good indie devs, that’s not a boycott.
The death of the sun will arrive before gamers actually do a boycott that is successful, because boycotts (especially for popular franchises or products) don’t work. If you rally up 10,000 people for a boycott, it’s less than 1% of sales AAA studios get and 70% of the boycotters are still going to buy the game regardless.
No change is going to happen ever, so the best thing to do is to start ignoring the AAA gaming industry altogether on a personal level.
A boycott only works if there’s meaningful alternatives. When one publisher effectively owns an entire genre of games. Expecting consumers to boycott is exactly what the big publishers want because it’s inneffective, what the publishers don’t want is for regulators to start paying attention
Voting with your wallet doesn’t work. Nobody will call you to ask why you didn’t buy a product, and marketing will just come up with a bogus reason on why sales are poor.
Talking about it on social media helps a lot more.
You can do both you know.
The first time I saw Ubisoft doing this was actually kinda neat because it was done well.
It was Rainbow Six Vegas/Vegas 2 and the billboards and posters scattered around were real ads. I thought it was a clever way to improve immersion.
Funny, cause nothing breaks immersion faster for me than product placement.
The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you’d see ads is when realistically it’d be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.
I remember one map was set at an exports event and they had esports sponsors everywhere.
The way they did it was actually, dare I say, tasteful. Basically the only time you’d see ads is when realistically it’d be likely for a poster or bill board to be present.
Placement isn’t the issue though.
If you recognize it as a legit/real advertisement, that breaks the immersion.
Your mind thinks “Why am I paying money to watch commercials?”, and that breaks the immersion of whatever virtual world you’re in at the time.
If the game is set in the “real world”, an advertisement for a fake brand of a real product is, to me at least, more immersion breaking than it being a real brand for that product. Now if the game isn’t set in our world it’s a completely different story.
The thing though is that the real advertisement will remind you that you paid money to watch a commercial, and that’s where the immersion breaking happens.
With a fake ad you know you didn’t pay real money to some other real human being somewhere else, and that your purchase went just for the recreational value of the game you’re playing.
In other words, it’s not the content of the ad, but the realization that it’s a real ad, regardless of it’s content, that’s immersion-breaking.
When you swing downtown to time square in spiderman, does your brain really care if it’s a real product on all those signs?
Yes, advertisements in game environments have always been the place to make stupid puns.
I loved the Pißwasser ads in GTA IV.
Clever or not, you’re not paying to watch advertisements, you’re paying to play a game as a recreational activity.
I did think it was clever, but I distinctly remember for R6V1, every single billboard, truck side, and bus stop poster, was Shia LaBeouf staring at you with binoculars for the movie “Disturbia” lol.
I guess in the R6 universe that was going to be the biggest film release of the century hahaha. Maybe they just didn’t get a ton of takers?
I think they did this in certain regions for battlefield 2142 also
I want to note since people are not happy with this example and still talking about the good old days, this method is pretty old-school In X-Men Mutant Academy is a pretty bad example but that’s why I remember it and I want to provide some sort of proof
I stopped buying Ubisoft games years ago. It was around that that time where they forced always-online mode on their single player games.
I stopped playing their games (literally) because I was sure from that point on the user experience is only going to get worse. I thing I was right in that decision.
Oo I think you got out before the custom launcher with it’s own BS currency that constantly “lost” your “cd keys” so you couldn’t even play singleplayer games you bought on steam huh? Good move. Well played.
It’s been so long I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they just cancelled my account but all my “keys” were used already and my games just won’t work anymore lol .
Meanwhile Black Flag occasionally downloads an update and I’m like “Yeah maybe one day…” Lol
Assassin’s creed and Siege ruined ubisoft.
They just stopped trying because they learned they can just milk loyal fans for all eternity.
Corporate culture killed Ubisoft.
Late stage capitalism ruined or will ruin every corporation FTFY
I stopped when I saw Valhalla didn’t have achievements on Steam. To me that represents either extreme pettiness or extreme laziness on their parts and I won’t support either.
That’s enough for me to never buy any of their games ever again.
Remember when they said that if we pay for the product, we dont get ads? :)
I also remember when they
artificiallydeliberately reduced XP gained after certain time in game so you either had to grind harder or buy booster packs. And they said it was adding value to the game because you get more playtime.This is such transparent bulshit excuse. Who wants their playtime to be more grind? But it’s probably why Assassins’ Creed even adopted XP systems at all.
If anything I want to go back to the days games had baked in cheats to become invincible and unlock everything so we can fuck around when we feel like it.
And yet franchise is thriving. AC was never my thing, especially because of boring fetch quests and collect-a-thons. WoW also had bunch of annoying quests like that, but at least the world building was awesome and lore was plentiful to enjoy the game.
I like the franchise because I’m into history. I was really looking forward to Mirage after the grindfests that were Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, but news like this make me consider not even waiting until Mirage is 50% off at some point.
You don’t need to say “artificially” here because the whole game is made by humans.
Deliberately or maliciously is more like it.
True true.
Sometimes you don’t even get the product if you pay for the product. AC: Odyssey will be in my Steam library forever unplayable because I had to delete my Ubisoft account for being hacked into and their support team absolutely refused to let me associate the game I purchased and thought I owned to a new Ubisoft account.
Fuck those guys. I will never pay money for their games ever again.
i can’t wait for the day when we will need to watch ads or buy premium before we can use our cars
BMW already tried to charge $18 a month for heated seats.
Wait, so they failed to implement that? (Jeez i hope so)
Nope, my boss has an i4 that has this bullshit.
I have an audi a3 that has the hardware for adaptive cruise control but cant use it because of the same bullshit…Car market is fuuuucked
Edit : fyi, i wasnt aware of the problem when ordering it, and its a company car so i didnt pay for it
You still bought the car
Leased it, company car, so i havent paid a single euro for it. And i didnt know they would pull this shit off. I ordered it without adeptive cruise control and got this shit instead.
I would never buy an audi lol, but as a company car, meh.
You mean rent premium (it’s a subscription of course)
Fuck cars, I want good public transit and walkable+bikeabke cities.
