A German YouTuber has claimed that an “intermediary agency” encouraged him to give positive coverage to Star Wars Outlaws.
From its outlandishly priced special editions, to the unflattering appearance of protagonist, to the absolutely abysmal state of its gameplay, to the fact that it’s PC release is wildly unoptimized, Ubisoft’s upcoming Star Wars title has been struggling to endear itself to players pretty much from the moment it was announced.
And now, it seems like it’s struggle is only destined to get worse, as it appears an advertising agency hired by Ubisoft to promote Star Wars Outlaws is pressuring online influencers into giving the game favorable coverage.
On August 2nd, German YouTube Channel PietSmiet co-host Peter Smits announced to the channel’s followers, as machine translated via DeepL, “Hi, Peter here. We’ve taken the Star Wars video offline. Not because we wanted to sweep something under the carpet or anything. But because it should never have been published and we don’t want it on the channel. We’ll talk a bit more about this in the next PietCast episode. I’m sorry.”
In light of this vague explanation, several users proceeded to accuse both Smits and his co-host Dennis “Br4mm3n” Brammen, the latter of whom actually played and produced the Star Wars Outlaws preview, of having their opinions bought off by Ubisoft.
As summarized by YouTube user @Wandercraft, the complaints against the channel revolved around the fact that “Brammen was allowed to play Outlaws and recorded 4 hours. A 1-hour video was cut from it, but the advertising agency didn’t like it, so it was shortened to 20 minutes and they apparently had to cut in the required wording, including a call for pre-orders. It annoyed a lot of people because [PietSmiet] is always against pre-ordering etc. and it came across as if their opinion was for sale.”
Eventually, this backlash would draw a response from Brammen himself, who in an apology to his viewers admitted, “I completely understand the arguments being made here and that wasn’t right.”
“I had the opportunity to play the game for 4 hours and it was edited into over an hour of video,” he then explained. “As part of the review process, the entire video was thrown back at us and an intermediary agency, not Ubisoft, asked for a lot of changes, especially to the wording at the beginning.”
“Since I personally thought the game was really cool, I didn’t see the big problem with that,” Brammen defended. “This was a huge miscalculation. Sorry, of course you don’t have to pre-order a game. You can of course buy whatever you want with your money. I absolutely enjoyed the version I was shown. The process behind it was for the ass [a German colloquialism meaning ‘in vain’] and I’m sorry that we didn’t push against it more, but let ourselves be beaten wide open. Sorry for that.”
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Notably, if Brammen’s claim of ‘advertising agency pressure’ is true, this would render any and all previews and eventual reviews of Star War Outlaws completely suspect – That is, more so than they already are given how Ubisoft previously hosted a number of online influencers and reviewers for a lavish preview event in Los Angeles.
Further, this overreach by Ubisoft to ostensibly ‘buy good press’ elicits memories of the original GamerGate, as game journalists giving unjust praise to curry favor with major publishers was a major complaint among those aligned with the consumer revolt.
In 2022, former Polygon editor Ben Kuchera claimed that not only were his reviews being re-written by the site’s Editor-in-Chief, but that he was also being pressured into changing his reviews score. During a subsequent, off-kilter rant that lasted four hours, Kuchera stated “I’m getting so many messages about corruption in games media, and these folks are right.”
