Well as long as the executives get bonuses and the 7-layer middle management cake remains intact. That’s the talent and skill that really matter at a video game company, right?
In Capitalism, the product is not the goal. Maximizing profits is the only thing that matters. In End-Game Capitalism, things start getting weird sometimes.
I’m shocked about this too but I think it’s hubris + the size of the market. Lots of dollars to be made, and so you get these slimy weasels with bland faces coming in, never having loved a game in their life, and coming to the conclusion: Oh gamers just stare at a screen with colorful things? Hey we could just make it a shop front, where you can buy colors in the colorful screen but pay us real money.
Fuck Ubisoft management and shareholders. I hope all the passionate devs leave and find jobs elsewhere.
Ubisoft’s fuck ups formed the indie studio that gave us expedition 33, so keep it up boys.
How long does it take to complete Expedition 33? I don’t have much time as I used to with games but I think I will play it, since I miss playing some good French-made games.
I spent 95 hours over a few months, did all but one super late game boss. I also went back and played the early game again to see if I missed anything early on. There’s a lot of optional content not necessary to the story but adds a bunch of depth. Kinda felt like final fantasy 10 and collecting the ultima weapons to take on end game bosses.
I think you can rush through the game in 15-30 hours and get most of the story. I’m not a completionist in any way but getting most of the dungeons and upgrades and beating some hidden bosses took me about 60 hours. I also didn’t feel the run time at all; The fighting system can be a lot of fun and there is always an interesting dungeon mechanic or twist on an old boss around the corner.
CEO states: “I held the pistol, but for some reason I aimed it directly at my foot.”
I’m starting to think execs in general have no grasp on reality.
Maybe surrounding yourself with bootlickers just isn’t so smart?
No they’re fully aware - there just aren’t any negative consequences.
The shareholders love it, until they don’t. Then these people get golden parachutes contracted from day 1.
Ubisoft stock has lost 90% of its value the past 5 years though, so I don’t think the shareholders are fans.
Which makes it even more insane that they haven’t realized that it’s time to take a step back and evaluate their strategy, but I guess there’s a point that they are extremely out of touch with reality.
Of course they are. “The shareholders” doesn’t have to mean the long term owners - it can mean the people who have invested, saw line go up, and sold. They are happy, the CEO is happily off to a new job sailing down on a golden parachute, and the customers after being shown the middle finger…
…preorder the next big title. Shit.
Seems like you never spoke to those people
If you like
They never have. What they have is ambition and a willingness to force others to make their wealth for them. Just push the peasants harder to get more gold.
True but in Ubisoft’s case, it really just seems like the market did a full 180° on the whole AAA open world, feature-heavy games. I don’t feel very sorry for the execs but it isn’t like the quality of the games themselves nosedived. They just couldn’t innovate.
it isn’t like the quality of the games themselves nosedived
I would argue it has. the early games were very story-driven and well written. the latest few, if they’ve continued the trend from Odyssey, which is the last one I played, are bloated, repetitive, boring, the writing is terrible, and the story is almost impossible to follow because you can play for several hours between consecutive plot points, and sometimes have to because of level-gating
People that say this haven’t played the older games and the new games. Ubisoft makes consistently good games. They’re all fairly derivative of each other and have a lot of feature and mechanic crossover, but the writing and game design is, on the whole, quite good. They suck for selling “cosnetics” that have unique features or abilities that youv cannot otherwise get in the game. And Valhalla and Odyssey were padded with content to encourage buying the boosters, and upgrading your ship took entirely too many resources. But if you’re getting level gated then you’re just plain not engaging with the content because the issue is overleveling, not underleveling. If you’re trying to sprint through the main story, I’m sorry but you’re playing the game wrong. But the new games have far less jank than the old ones. The stealth is different but works more or less the same. I think people have very rose tinted glasses when it comes to assassin’s creed. The old games are barely playable, you’re constantly jumping to your death because of the shitty controls, desynchronizing for getting caught during the shitty eavesdrop and stalk sections. Like the only thing they did better was social stealth which Valhalla had. If you don’t like health bars and upgrade paths that’s fine but the new AC games are legitimately just better games. And this discounts Prince of Persia, Frontiers of Pandora and star wars outlaws which were all recent fantastic games. Fuckin Rayman. Ubisoft makes good games they just have shitty business practices and treat their customers poorly. But they make good games.
The quality definitely did nosedive in every Ubisoft series. It’s been that way for years now. Nothing they’ve been putting out the last decade has met the standard of quality set by their competition. Ubisoft has been digging their own grave through sheer incompetence alone since 2016.
They don’t mean the worker bees with “talent”. But the money makers.
How can the onion compete with this?
That sounds like a problem for a future quarterly report.
But there is still a management bonus for this quarter - right?
I will just leave this article from 5 days ago here:
Ubisoft Barcelona Celebrates Successful Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Launch With Layoffs
Despite Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced being considered a successful launch by Ubisoft, 51 employees at Ubisoft Barcelona, many of whom worked on the game, will be celebrating its launch by seeking new employment.
Announced on June 10, 51 employees at Ubisoft Barcelona face layoffs, with those who spoke to Insider Gaming saying the layoffs felt premeditated and were going to happen no matter how successful Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced was.
See that chicken laying golden eggs? Would it be funny if I butcher it? Lets watch.
Ubisoft still has talent or skill?
well they have a lack of- :)
Well well well. If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions…
Me sowing: fuck yeah, this is awesome
Me reaping: aw fuck . . .
LOL Like, they just now considered that?! C-Suites needed to take a pay cut instead and keep people hired to make games that would get them out of the financial fuckery the C-Suites got themselves into.
Executive paycuts aren’t going to cover the delta of 1000 job cuts per year. Everyone loves to cite that one time Nintendo did that, but the math just usually doesn’t work out to the point where this solves layoffs or something. What’s going to get them out of financial fuckery and keep their talent retained is if they stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on projects like Hyperscape, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar that people don’t want and instead make games that their customers do want.
Okay, criticize Ubisoft and other publishers for a lot of shit, but in my view things like Star Wars Outlaws are off limits.
Is the game amazing? No. But it’s an idea using a fresh character in an underserved IP. They put together a lot of things based on unique ideas - and it didn’t hit.
That’s a consequence of a company taking risks, even though we generally want them to take risks. They put out 8 new singleplayer IPs, 7 are junk to be forgotten while one becomes the next Halo franchise.
Taking paycuts to execs can better excuse paycuts at low level, and can slow the bleed if the company is to accept going into the red during a new game’s development.
I’ll agree with you that a lot of projects are getting overfunded. Good games don’t need thousands of people working on them. It can help with tertiary objectives like accessibility, marketing, or other features.
I have no criticisms myself for Star Wars Outlaws, as I didn’t play it, but the market didn’t want it, and Star Wars is for sure not underserved. I have been inundated with so much Star Wars since Disney bought it that I’m sick of it, and I’m not even seeking it out. The other thing I’m sick of is the Ubisoft Open World Game. I’ve played a lot of those. They built an efficient machine for churning those out. The market seems to be sick of them, too, at least relative to its former appetite. It’s not surprising that people are tired of both Ubisoft’s formula and Star Wars. You take a risk with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a moderately budgeted game. You don’t take a risk with $200M+; that’s lunacy. Even with The Lost Crown, they reminded me via their Ubisoft launcher and additional DRM why I haven’t missed purchasing Ubisoft games for so many years.
things like Star Wars Outlaws are off limits
That’s a bit too far in the other direction, innit?
Games (or anything really) don’t get immunity from criticism just because they take risksEven I said in my comment it wasn’t a fantastic game. It likely could have been a lot better, and I don’t fault anyone bored by it. But I take issue with claims it shouldn’t have been made - that greenlighting it alone was the mistake.
“Don’t make bad game, dummy, just make good game” isn’t a tremendous observation.
Sometimes I don’t even think the way people summarize Ubisoft games as “open world” is a good descriptor of their failures. I will see people meanwhile applaud dozens of games that can all qualify as “open world”.
Maybe Ubisoft is deserving of a lot of criticism, but I’d also put them in perspective against an Xbox that is canceling studios and games left and right, and a Sony that just isn’t making anything except 8 more Last of Us remakes. No clue if EA even makes anything anymore.
Yeah outlaws was great, we get a fun non Jedi star wars story that feels part of the universe and stays open for room for more? It was a damn good time and I enjoyed Kay Vess as a character.
1000 x 70000 gross salary or whatever = 70 mil. 70 mil isn’t endless amounts of money in the managerial world, actually.
Didn’t both those games review and sell well? They were both polished and pretty fantastic actually.
I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren’t free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that’s still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn’t mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they’re generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.
I’m not familiar with hyperscape but the other two are about 70 on metacritic. That’s a pretty great score considering launch performance. But then no game in the last five years at least has launched without shitty initial performance. Where are you getting information about sales numbers though? Most publishers are very vague about hard numbers what with the bullshit subscription services but I didn’t see anything that indicated they lost money on either title.
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.
Seventy is good bordering on great. What the hell is this trend of everyone thinking seven out of ten is garbage when it’s better than most? Seventy is a very good score. I understand that everyone says this and that, everyone says they underperformed but nobody has any hard data, and all the people that have actually played the games have a positive experience. I also don’t know why everyone is automatically attributing layoffs to poor sales when literally every game company and media company and just fuckin every company is doing the same. Clearly ubisoft is suffering financially, but it isn’t because they make bad games. Literally everything consumer-hostile practice they have other companies do more aggressively. Ubisoft doesn’t hold a candle to the mtx fuckery of rockstar and bethesda but nobody trashes their games like the Ubisoft dogpile. Like yeah, the games are derivative and remix mechanics ad nauseum but they’re high quality for the most part. You get a shit load of content, the writing is always solid, they’re fun to play. I just can’t help feeling like most of the people circlejerking Ubisoft hate were probably active in gamergate.
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold.
There are soft thresholds around mid 80s and around 90 where review scores have tangible effects on sales, which is part of how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur go on to sell multiple millions of copies despite a fraction of the marketing budget that Ubisoft commands.
I don’t care if you like Ubisoft games. They just spent a lot of money making games that not enough people bought to justify those budgets.
Instead they can waste hundreds of millions on executive salaries.
The CEO makes $1.5M per year in cash, so I very much doubt they’re spending hundreds of millions on executive salaries.
Imagine tanking a company through sheer incompetence and then being paid 1.5 million a year anyway.
Lmao Ubisoft is unbelievably fucked. I see full shutdown or sale within 2 years.
After subtracting 1 from 1 the difference being 0 is a big danger
“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” 🌭
