Ubisoft quietly buries its "microtransactions are fun" line - Black Flag Resynced shows why

Remember when Ubisoft told its investors, with a straight face, that microtransactions actually make games *more fun*? That line quietly vanished from the company's newest financial report. No apology, no explanation - it's just gone.

And honestly, the timing is almost comedic. It disappears in the same week that Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced lands to a wall of angry reviews, precisely because of - you guessed it - microtransactions.

The math doesn't lie

Here's the part that stings for us. Black Flag Resynced sells for around 70 euros in our part of Europe. That's a full-price, single-player game - a remake of a title from 2013 that plenty of people already own on an older console. On top of that sticker price, Ubisoft loaded a Helix store with cosmetic packs, ship skins, and "time-savers." The reported total? Roughly 80 to 90 dollars' worth - more than the Deluxe edition of the game itself.

And not all of it is just paint. One of the packs is a map that unlocks secret locations in the world for real money. So a chunk of what used to be plain old exploration - the thing that made the original Black Flag special - is now sitting behind a paywall.

Ubisoft's defense is the usual script: it's all optional, never a requirement, you can finish the whole story without spending a cent. Sure. But "optional" stops meaning much when a 70-euro game is designed with a cash register bolted onto the side.

What it means for players here

For a player here, this is the maddening bit. Seventy euros is real money - that's a big chunk of a normal paycheck for something that's essentially a spruced-up old game. There's no regional pricing softening the blow, and the second-hand route that saved us on physical discs doesn't help much when the value is being drained into an online store.

My honest take? Deleting a cringe line from a spreadsheet changes nothing. Ubisoft didn't have a change of heart, it had a PR problem. The behaviour is identical - they just stopped bragging about it in front of investors.

The good news is the pushback is landing. Mixed reviews, mockery, headlines - that's the only language this stuff responds to. If you're tempted, wait, watch a stream, and decide whether you're buying a game or renting access to a shop.

Image: LostplanetKD73 / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_NYCC_Cosplay_of_Assassin%27s_Creed_group.jpg