Xbox and Ubisoft apologize for lackluster Inside Xbox & Valhalla showing

Now, here’s something you don’t see every day. Gamers are notoriously hard to satisfy and even the best gaming events always tend to sprout discontent users. Those are for the most part a small minority, however. But yesterday’s much-hyped Inside Xbox event from Microsoft thoroughly fell flat, not the least thanks to Ubisoft’s much-touted worldwide gameplay reveal for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla ending up being nothing more than highly-edited trailer being extremely thin on actual gameplay.

What would usually be quickly forgotten and especially not even addressed by companies has turned into an interesting show of modesty by Xbox and Ubisoft. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s Creative Director Ashraf Ismail directly commented on the negative reception of the gameplay trailer by agreeing that viewers deserved to see much more. At the same time, Ismail also promised that there is still a long marketing campaign in front of the anticipated new Assassin’s Creed title where the developer plans to show a lot more real gameplay in the vein of what fans want.

It’s actually quite fascinating that there was such harsh feedback from the gaming community since it’s quite the standard procedure to initially release flashy but in the end non-representative “gameplay” trailers. These simply tend to be much easier to market than actual gameplay footage.

The crux of the backlash can rather be attributed to Microsoft over-promising on the Inside Xbox show and leaving them naturally weak to under-deliver in spades. Xbox Games Marketing General Manager Aaron Greenberg also admitted that they might have set wrong expectations in a response on Twitter and promises to learn from this ordeal.

They ought to since you can look forward to seeing similar events about the Xbox Series X and next-gen games throughout the remaining year until Microsoft’s new console launches. It would hardly be good if every event would result in disappointed masses.