AC research: Assassins creed IV: Black flag

Assassins creed Black flag(2013) holds a unique position in the AC franchise being the only game in which you

1. Don't play as an actual Assassin

2. Do not follow a creed

Instead playing as a scourge of the seas, a pirate, who stole the gear of a actual assassin but later on does take the creed and join the brotherhood but for most of the game you play a pirate over an assassin. This has huge impacts in both gameplay and story giving the player command of a ship and a trusty crew while traveling and meeting famous or Infamous depending how you look at it historical pirates such as Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet.

Black Flag had a reported Budget of 100 million, Mainly developed by Ubisoft Montréal with additional help from Ubisoft's other studios around the globe. Black Flag was released in what most consider a great time for gaming, A time period that Black Flag stood out in as most triple A games at the time were set in the modern day( GTA 5, Battlefield 4, Payday 2, Call of Duty Ghosts) while Black Flag is obviously set in the 18th century.

The target audience for Black flag is difficult to decipher because of the franchise wide appeal, its like asking who the target audience for Star wars is, its a bit pointless because nearly every movie goer has seen a star wars. Same thing for Gamers with assassins creed. Overall if I had to say the demographic profile is most likely 20 somethings men with decent disposable income in urban areas. I mainly think this because of the games pegi rating, the fact that gaming is a expensive hobby and that a majority of gamers are men. When it comes to a franchise as big as Assassins creed i believe that the audience is more often than not the majority of the audience as large media products like Black Flag cater to them with safe and know concepts like AC and the simplistic gameplay helps with this as well, with the psychographic profile i believe that AC applies to those who enjoy history as a majority of the games including Black Flag take pride in their historical accuracy that only those versed in history would be able to appreciate, the audience would also be knowledgeable of AC considering its size so its most likely core AC fans would be apart of the target audience, the games narrative also takes itself somewhat seriously so it would have to be someone who can take video games seriously as a artform.

AC Black Flags marketing, just like the game itself, is incredibly unique as a huge part of the marketing was a excavation team being funded by Ubisoft who found the corpse of a real pirate called Amaro Pargo in a tomb under church in Domingo, canary islands finding him buried with his bodyguard, parents, eight other adults and some children. He was a experienced pirate, slaver and merchant who apparently donated a large amount of his accumulated wealth to the church? This was mainly spread in Spanish circles for the ,marketing and Ubisoft used the knowledge from his life to help understand the golden age of pirating. Ubisoft also partnered with Sony to bring exclusive content to the ps3 and 4 featuring the main character of Assassins Creed 3 liberation. They even made a manga adaption of the game to go along with release to tap into the Asian audience.

When applying media theories I believe that Henry Jenkins Fandom theory fits well with AC black flag. Henry's theory states that fans of a piece of media are active participants in the media they are fans of, appropriating the original piece of media and read them in ways not fully intended by the media consumers(textual poaching). This is prevalent in todays fandom culture that impacts so much of todays media including AC black flag. When it comes to video games my favorite example of "textual poaching" are always speedruns, were the most dedicated fans of a game attempt to beat the game as fast as possible competing with each others times in what can sometimes be a grueling experience. The Speedrunning community has different category for runs to go into like Any%, the only goal being to get to the end of the games main story regardless of how much of the games side content is completed, and 100%, where the goal is to complete all of the games content including main story and side content which in some games like Black flag with thousands of mundane collectables can be a real pain. Black flags current any% holder is a Russian player by the user name of Ectortutu and its 100% holder is the Australian player Tasz with Ectortutu making a another podium placement at second. Its clear that Black flag along with the vast majority of games was not indented or designed to be played in this way by the author but despite that these fans still put in all hat effort into something relatively niche with little reward all for the love of the game.

Another applicable media theory is Stuart Halls Reception theory that says that communication through the media is a process that involves encoding by the producers, putting messages in, and encoding by the audiences, decoding the messages put into the media either having a preferred reading intended by the author, negotiated reading