Ubisoft's Problems Have Finally Caught Up with Them | Unpacked
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- Опубліковано 10 жов 2024
- Lots of changes are coming to Ubisoft as their long-running issues have finally caught up to them financially.
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The fact that stealth had to be ‘reintroduced’ to Assassin’s Creed of all things is the most damning line in this video.
To be fair - stealth in Assassin's Creed has kinda always taken a back seat to action. Or if it was there it was very basic stealth. This reminds me a heck of a lot more of something like Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and I think that's a good thing - Nick
Its very hard to sneak in if there is not fun arquitecture to go around (in the case of old ancient Egypt/Rome, ye ol' England, and old US). Medieval time is definitely a very good setting for AC (not just medieval Europe
stealth in the series has never really been that good, its not like thief or something
There is a reason that the stealth mission is right up there with the escort mission. It’s very hard to make fun, especially compared to diving in with guns or swords blazing. But I am all for innovation, if someone can make it fun or otherwise worthwhile.
@@MaxG628 I mean stealth levels are bad because if you have a game built around something else suddenly making it into a different genre with harsh failure penalties is going to suck - stealth games by themselves are fine, because theyre built around it and you dont like instantly lose if youre caught or something. Thief 1-3 is my favourite series.
A DOZEN Battle Royale titles all in development at once?! What?! WHY?!
To throw shit at the wall and see what sticks (none of it will stick)
Because their CEO is an incompetent buffoon. And yes, I did call him an incompetent buffoon twice in the last sentance.
MBAs don’t actually know how to run a business. They were taught by failed businessmen, so they only know repeat past success until it fails hard.
Chasing trends since trendy games make a ton of profit, higher-ups think of them as the safest form of income
Unfortunately for them, chasing trends is as risky as making sometheing bold and unique, because when you're done making a trendy game, no one is intersted in that type anymore, and those that are, already too busy playing the games thst settled in
Now I want to see a battle royal game in the vein of Game Dev Tycoon. A hundred game devs competing to make the best battle royal game.
Let's not forget that ubisoft covered up the executives' horrendous abuse of staff and has done absolutely nothing to change their practices, except to dig deeper on protecting the executives and favoured employees from any consequences for their abhorrent behaviour.
Yup, I think this takes precedence over any other discussion of games and any other output.
If you abuse employees to the point of systemic sexual harassment (with zero actual repercussions for any of the perpetrators), then you don’t really deserve to be on the market, sorry.
I don't care, and neither do you. You ignore thousands of other companies doing evil on a daily basis. You're not a saint, you're not a hero, you support shit people too. Grow up.
100 percent this.
Far more immediate than "capitalism continues to ruin things exhibit 274"
Never let it be forgotten, nor forgiven, that Ubisoft is the Vatican of Videogames.
It's funny, they refused to make new Rayman games, saying they wouldn't be profitable, but were burning money at a rate of nauts to chase Fortnite.
the smaller ubisoft games are totally profitable. Anno is doing great, mirage did alright and PoP 2D at least had good reviews. with the changes they announced, like day 1 steam and less convoluted versioning they these games could be a cornerstone of their portfolio. they just need to stop pissing away hundreds of millions on neverending shitshows like skull & bones and BGE2
@@guybrush20X6 if they made an Astrobot type Rayman game it would totally do well especially since a lot of people are now nostalgic for that series and miss it.
Because their shareholders don't care if they make something reasonably profitable. They only want Ubisoft to make the next Fortnite. Because if they can do that, it will justify years of other games bombing. It's a toxic business plan.
Better to release nothing than release something small that is only moderately profitable.
Until you release something you can posture to investors like you're about to release something earth shatteringly huge
The studio who made the Rayman games made the new Prince of Persia. It's an excellent game with great reviews. It only sold 300 000 copies. It pains me, but with everybody already on a live service game or hooked on UA-cam or whatever, making just a solid game isn't enough to get sales anymore.
"How dare gamers expect a product to work on day one?" -Ubisoft
That kind of thing won't even be technologicaly possible for at least another decade ago.
I should get a job there, do absolutely nothing productive for my first week, and if they try to fire me, I'll just say it was a troubled launch and they can't reasonably expect me to work right away.
"Ultra polished" is the now code for "does what it says on the packaging"
“Ultra polished” = wanting a game that actually works and doesn’t, oh I don’t know, make you delete your save with all your early access progress on…
To be fair, the amount of polish needed to ensure this doesn't happen to anyone is pretty "Ultra", but at the same time, that's what you sign for when you decide to make any kind of software.
@@_Ve_98 I don't know, seems to happen constantly with ubisoft.
As one Cobbler said about Ubisoft:
"By the time you realize your formula doesn't work anymore, you will have 10 games with that formula DEEP in development.....it'll be too late to change by then.
And that's the real problem of modern AAA gaming: You absolutely need to go as fast as possible from the moment you start production in earnest until it launches. This means huge teams, or you will never have sufficient speed. But that also means rote game design and minimal opportunities to change anything, because once you launched 400+ people at a specification document, large changes are incredibly expensive.
Your best bet is to make an indie game in-house, trying new things, keeping it all secret, and after you see that the innovations work, just throw your large team at the problem: Basically what Sid Meier and Peter Molineaux did back when teams were only 20 and they built prototypes with 2 people, but now every step costs 50x what it did before.
Always happy to see another member of the Cobbler cult.
Hail Cobbler! Haha
And it's particularly bad that the formula they're chasing is one of the most ruinously expensive to develop and run, and has such intense competition that all demand all of their players' free time. The market can only support so many at a time. It's MMOs all over again.
@@jorgemontero6384 Not to mention the money involved. If their budgets weren't so overblown, they would have a much better chance at actually turning a profit. 1 million sales would be fine, if the game didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create.
The thing that used to keep the big "AAA" publishers going was not the size of their games, but the variety. They had multiple smaller studios, with smaller budgets, and shorter development times. So they could release multiple different games to multiple different audiences each year. If one or two games failed, it wasn't a complete disaster, because there were others to pick up the slack. But now, they've clearly forgotten all about that. They ate all the small studios, and shoved everything together into one place. So now they're forced to dump all their eggs into one flimsy basket, and hope for the best. And its been slowly destroying them. Because now, one failure means half a decade of resources are completely wasted, with nothing to back it up.
Like all "good" business men, they have been eagerly barreling towards the point of unsustainability in the pursuit of infinite growth. Numbers must get bigger! Line must go up! Forever! They can't go back to making smaller games, because those gigantic budgets make the company look more attractive to investors. And the investors are the only thing keeping their companies going at this point, since all their customers are abandoning them.
They climbed the tallest mountain, only to find the biggest fall waiting for them at the top.
Ubisoft memo: "I caused this problem, but you get blamed for it. Now fix my mistake"
But Ubi, you told us to get comfortable not owning your games, so we have to get comfortable not owning your mistakes either.
My dude, that's ALL OF MODERN CAPITALISM for the past 50 years.
@@listofromantics It's the circle of bullshit. Nature is beautiful!
X-D
„Players expect polished games from day one…“
Yeah?! Players expect the stuff they buy to actually work from the get-go?! Shocking!
Seriously, videogame industry… the only place where „we expect the stuff we buy to work“ is not taken as a given.
I think that's the tech industry in general. And it's slowly metastasizing elsewhere - See Boeing and making planes that Fly, or Tesla and Making Trucks that don't chop your finger off. Or AI and AI that doesn't tell you to put glue in your food.
Tesla and AI both still count as "the tech industry"
Paying for early access? Bud, you're paying to be the final bug tester before the launch. Your money is better spent on _Bastion_ if you haven't played it yet.
I believe Far Cry 3 was the main reason for Ubisoft's downfall.
They simply peaked with that game and suddenly, they had a golden formula that could be applied to any action adventure title. And they went for it.
What they forgot to take with them though, was the mature and amazingly well-written themes and characters.
They even tried to invent a formula for those stuff with FC5, but we all know you cannot formulate talent.
Goodbye Ubisoft, I don't think I'll even miss you.
In the end corpos have this bully attitude towards storytelling in that they believe it was NEVER good stories that held up solid formulas.
Ubisoft and Bethesda ultimately ran into the same fate-Bethesda's made the 2006 Game of the Year five times (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield), each increasingly demonstrating why it wasn't 2006 anymore when they came out.
Ubisoft has made the 2012 Game of the Year oh, heck, I lost count, starting with Far Cry 3. One could argue that they've made the 2007 GOTY over and over since the first Assassin's Creed.
It's not a good sign when a line from Far Cry 3 is a question most people would bring regarding Ubisoft these days...
Eh...I'd argue even some of their most formulaic games are decent story wise. It's just the copy paste slop model ruins it
Farcry 6 was the hammer.
Still had old *very* outdated "features" like player teathering during co-op so you couldn't walk very far away from the host.... in an OPEN WORLD game.
Maybe sales are down because the complete product now costs $200+ at a time when many potential customers are struggling just to afford the inflated prices of food and shelter.
*this isn't difficult*
1) you can't have infinite growth in a finite system.
2) the money that people should have to buy things, is stolen/hoarded by the corpos trying to sell things.
"Hold steady" is often (if not always) death in a capitalist system. I am agreeing with you, but it's hard especially for money men to do anything other than chase the Number Go Up. They aren't taught to do or rewarded for anything else.
This is why inflation exists.
The system isn't finite. Resources are finite, the value of those resources are not. The growth comes from value.
Everyone knows that. Everyone also knows that not every company will survive. There is no solidarity amidst corpos either, so the only one's complaining are the one's struggling. Someone has to draw the short end of the stick even in the corpo world. In the end most investors simply don't need to care. Afterall, even among them, a sucker is born every day.
The last Ubi game I bought was Valhalla, and it was a disappointment in how unfocused and bloated it is. I regret my purchase and coupled with how awful the company has treated sexual abuse victims I have completely stopped buying Ubisoft.
Only 1 million over a month for a *STAR WARS GAME* is absolutely insane. They dropped the ball so hard on that one. It's just... Boring. Who wants to use a pistol forever? Who wants to do the same outpost mission over and over?
Don't you know Han Solo uses a laser pew pew?? :'D
I don't care about Star Wars, but I was surprised to learn a game in that universe about outlaws didn't involve creating your own. The title seems directly evocative of that to me - pick a race and then customize your approach to smuggling, fighting, etc.
I don't think they made the game people wanted from that premise.
@@Svafne And who wants to play as ugly not-Han Solo?
as a star wars fan nothing in this game looks appealing. the most interesting parts of the franchise are the weird side stories with interesting characters. outlaws teaser seemed like it would deliver on that premise, and then (invisible) walls you out from having fun
Star Wars is almost as dead as Ubisoft, so that doesn’t help the timing of Outlaws.
I watched someone play Star Wars Outlaws and it looked like they were playing Watch Dogs 2 with a Star Wars mod.... thats the problem I have with Ubisoft, their big AAA games feel like reskins not fresh games
It's been that way with them since far cry 5 in like 2018
If it actually was Watch Dogs 2 with a star wars mod, the game would have amazing gameplay in regards to mission approach lol
@@lucasLSD no it wouldn't. I played watch dogs. It was boring. I'm sad to say I had more fun playing COD, which is in the top three for "worst game franchise of all time".
Watchdogs was so janky and boring, I turned it off before the first mission was done.
Ubisoft hasn't put out anything worth my time in over 10 years.
Its not a popular perspective, im sure, but i think Ubisoft dying is a good thing for the industry. Now, i dont want the GOOD employees at Ubisoft to lose their jobs, of course. I hope they can rebound well enough. But as a whole, Ubisoft has been a major player in the decline of the industry, lowering quality of game launches, lowering expectations and standards of a game, and raising the tolerance of anti consumer practices. I truly do hope Ubisoft doesnt just vanish but implodes in the most spectacular fashion just as a warning for contemporaries to take note. EA, Activision, and the like can all pivot. Im sure they wont. They have virtually never turned over a new leaf for the betterment of the industry or the benefit of the consumer. These major publishers are the deceitful politicians of the gaming world. They dont care about us, they just care about their yachts.
made the mistake of buying outlaws without really looking into it... I'm forcing myself to play the whole game to remind myself to never again buy an ubisoft game
everyone I talked to so far said it's a fine game. nothing special, a tad bit easy, but fun, with a good atmosphere and some novel concepts like finding masters to teach you skills. I haven't had a look at it myself, but it sounds quite alright.
@@KaBeeM That's the thing. It's unremarkable, cookie cutter, just okay, and plays like the last six or seven Ubisoft developed titles.
I'm amazed you made it to the very end of 2024 before learning this lesson. Hopefully you truly do learn it and don't forget it the next time they put out a flashy trailer with pretty graphics.
@@KaBeeM As someone who played Gothic 2, your comment on finding masters to learn skills being novel makes me feel old...
I got Far Cry Primal for free and somehow didn't get my money's worth.
there's a reason they say "vote with your wallet"
and "DO NOT PRE ORDER"
The “Money Über Alles” mindset ultimately kills everything it grabs.
"For the love of money is the root of all evil..." I'm no Christian, but I always seem to find pearls of wisdom in the Gospel of Matthew.
@@SimuLord I've recently learned the true depths and meaning of the bit about not casting your pearls before swine.
@@t_k_blitz4837 The whole of Matthew 7 is good, common sense moral wisdom, but 7:9-10 is particularly germane to Ubisoft:
“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?"
If that's not Ubisoft's game design philosophy-giving stones and snakes to hungry gamers seeking a Filet-O-Fish sandwich-I don't know what is.
I find it mind-blowing that game budgets can be so high, yet they apparently cannot stretch to proper QA testing. Not that it is unique to Ubisoft.
As the game gets more complex so does the QA load.
I know it's splitting hairs a bit, but you can almost always assume that QA spotted all problems you saw and more - but either there was no time, or no intent to fix the things they reported.
Like, whenever I read 'Lol, didn't they do any testing?' it's frustrating, because of course there was QA. But the testers aren't the ones FIXING the damn thing, you know?
@@Bustermachine If you need to add complexity to make your game interesting, you should be making a television series instead of a game. Games should have inherently interesting gameplay loops.
The whole point of live service is that it's a game you keep coming back to forever and don't play much of anything else. The model itself leads to market saturation as there are only so many people to play these games, and only so much time they have to actually invest in a live service.
Meanwhile their single player games are the same paint by numbers formula without innovation, so why invest in a new Ubisoft game when you have a massive backlog of games for cheap that do the same thing, or other companies that are doing their formula but better (Sucker Punch).
I blame WOW. Decades later companies are still chasing that infinite money cow, looking for cheap formulas instead of trying to compete.
Star Wars Outlaws is a example of quality over quantity? Am I crazy? The game has neither quality nor quantity.
True.
But it has a disfigured, leatherface scarecrow-girl as a protagonist.
Apparently, that's a plus these days.
@@mikexf1647 The protagionist is a conventionally attractive young woman with slightly frazzled hair. You're nuts.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs ....She is not attractive.
@@mikexf1647 I found her kinda cute precisely because unlike most video game female protagonists, she looks like someone who's been beat up a bit by life. And as much as I love the "most common superpower", someone needs to tell gaming concept artists that not every woman in a video game needs to look like she put the plastic surgeon's kids through college and must own stock in a silicone company.
@SimuLord
I can understand that.
But they uglyfied the actress she was modeled after.
Anyway, it was just a silly comment meant to be somewhat humorous.
Even their "break glass with AC in Japan in case of an emergency" is backfiring.
I have lost hope about ubisoft for many years
Yeah they had a bunch of wildly different franchises that they just watered down to be different flavors of CLIMB THE TOWER
I'm certainly not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they changed into what they are today, the company can change into something else. I'll just wait and see. And buy games if they're good.
SamuraiMotoko please don't hype yourself up without posting evidence first. You should be able to prove you're not responsible for ubisoft spiraling the drain if you have the audacity to post that comment.
We don't live in a bubble. Ubisoft is definitely struggling, and not for no reason. I was always against Star Wars Outlaws, AC Shadows, AC Shadows, and I've always been against "female protagonists" when real women refuse to register for the draft.
I didn't buy the shit games. I shared my opinion, even if it lost me friends.
You people can't say the same. You're the reason my favorite company in the world is done. I hate you all.
I haven't purchased an Ubisoft game in well over a decade. And, I really feel like that's because the signs of bad decisions and poor employee treatment has been on the walls for a lot longer than just the last 5 years.
ETA: I will probably buy the new PoP, just because it seems to have been made with clear goals and sound direction, along with being well tested.
Almost like it was a great, working product on release...
The issue is that they have not only dilluted their perfect formula that they had. They also started to chase every medial trends at the same time. Multiplayer, Microtransactions, NFTs, they really chased anything that they could see.
I feel like “chase” is a bit too generous here, more like “stumble”. Their microtransactions for instance primarily consisted of “buy an XP booster to actually balance the games and have to play less!” Which needless to say is a nonsensical strategy.
@@courier6960 their NFTs weren't masterpieces either. They chase, but fail in most cases.
Sounds like a C-suite that got too much money so now they're disconnected from reality.
Part of me wonders if Ubisoft going private would actually light the fire under their ass. Go full AA, make good games on a budget and spend time making good product to win back good will. They're currently dying as is to take the gamble to make good games and listen to your audience. Find a niche and focus on it instead of the widest net possible.
Perhaps I'm being naively optimistic here, but maybe they're sick of the demands of shareholders pushing them to chase trends and they're looking at going private so they can chase their own ideas that might actually turn into quality.
Of course tanking the value of the company first makes it a whole lot easier to buy back, perhaps it was a long term strategy 😁
Them going private wouldn't fix anything. The issue with the company is the leadership, not the shareholders. Ubisoft is failing to make good quality games and make money. Getting rid of shareholders wouldn't fix their core management issues.
It'll be just like Bungie when they became independent after leaving Activision. Nothing was changed, the same problems persisted. Corpo leadership may be responsible for bad monetization, but they aren't responsible for outright bad games.
@@NomastiAfricanWarlord Totally agree, Yves Guillemot and Alain Corre are greedy, glorified used car salesmen. They're bean counters. What interests them is not quality or artistic achievement, it's profit. Going private is a matter of control and escaping accountability.
@@NomastiAfricanWarlord I did caveat it with "I might be being naively optimistic", you're probably right but we can still hope
Going private won't save them because of who will be the owner making the decisions after they do.
I know the average gamer may not care, but their ethical problems cannot be overstated. Ubisoft execs covered up the SA of employees and no one was really held accountable. The worst offenders were allowed to leave with their golden parachutes.
For years now its the same thing. EA, Rock Star, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and name any other AAA studio you want. They aren't making games anymore, they are trying to make profit margins. The small studios have been killing it cause they are doing what all the studios have before them that made great games. They make great games. Ones with passion to be made and brought into our world. Instead they keep making button mashers cause thats what the kids say they want. Well guess what.... kids don't know what they want in games, thats why they are on TikTok. Real devs know what they want in a game, and they are making them. Let these big studios rot and fail and make way for passion again.
They're not chasing profit margins, they're chasing an audience that doesn't exist.
I'd argue Rockstar doesn't fit into that description. Their games are fantastic: polished, well-written and not monetised through microtransactions (save through the multiplayer modes, which is fine).
Ubisoft can't make money for anyone...except for UA-camrs, who have had an absolute bonanza dancing on the patch of dirt they're about to dig six feet down to bury Ubisoft in.
Gamers have been telling Ubisoft FOR YEARS that they’re going in the wrong direction, that this isn’t what we want. They insisted on chasing dumb trends, forcing PC users to install their launcher, adding way too many battle passes and MTXs, and creating too many special editions. I feel no sympathy for a company that has not listened to its customers for about a decade. I do feel bad for the hard working devs who are impacted by layoffs and cutbacks. Maybe if Ubi starts doing right by their customers, they can salvage the company before it’s too late. Oh, and they need to fire all their abusive CEOs like Yves.
Excellent video! I’m now well caught up on the Ubisoft stuff and have been given a great perspective on it, as well.
I hear all this talk from Ubisoft about how they want to be better, then in the same breath - they say 'We're planning to release 10 more assassins creeds games.'
If only they didn't become known for games getting 25% and 50% sale prices within a month of release, maybe then they wouldn't blame opening week sales figures on anyone but themselves...
They're blaming us because they themselves got comfortable with keeping things formulaic in sucking our money instead of just giving players... the next good game.
Ubisoft, Blizzard and EA are the 3 companies who I boycott. I am a nice, normal person who lives and lets live, my problems with these aren't political or frothing hatred, I just can't support them for what they have done to my hobby.
Maybe you should become political!
The world doesn't have to be this way..
@@Svafne Then I would have to spend my time around polititians... I'm happy being unimportant and insignificant
You should expand your boycott from Blizzard to just Activision
"my problems with these aren't political or frothing hatred, I just can't support them for what they have done to my hobby."
I don't think you fully understand what "politics" means...
@@danilooliveira6580 People often learn the definition of a word by context, and a lot of people on youtube use a very strange definition of 'politics' along with 'the message'. :/
I really hope the Lost Crown is a success so Ubisoft gets the message. I even bought it at launch, completely aware that it would be 50% off a month later.
Unfortunately, sales were apparently pretty lackluster. :( I was right there with you, buying the game at launch, even though I would usually never do that with an Ubisoft title.
Niche IP will never make a trillion dollars. Why would they bother?
They will put 60 billion into AAAA live service development though
Star Wars Outlaws - "Focusing on Quality"?!
are you kidding?!
The whole video put a somewhat bemused look on my face but that line really hit me.
I mean it does look really pretty. It's just not very fun to play.
@@ChuckPalomo does it look really pretty?!
just from the general graphics perspective it looks more like a PS4 game. (the character models are definitely nothing to write home about)
He's talking about quality of content, not technical polish. The game has far fewer "dungeons" and points of interest than, say, Valhalla, but they're more diverse and elaborate, and there's usually a little story attached to finding and/or exploring them. It's more focused, less bloated.
@@KainGerc People say that about anything nowadays, but it does look pretty. If you rip out the character hero assets they're probably 100k polygons with tons of complex deformations and intricacies for the faces, hair, and clothing that required advanced systems and tons of man hours. Maybe you just prefer photorealism? anyway, that's not the problem, it's just a very shallow game that's not fun to play.
You want me to sound off about paying more for "early access"? Oh buddy I will sound off then. The whole business model is predatory BS preying on the FOMO of streamers who need to be there on day 1 for the best chance at an audience, as well as regular people who are incredibly worried about spoilers. And "early access" or "play x days early"? No, let's call it what it is. It's delayed access for everyone who doesn't pay the extra a mount of money. Day 1 is the day the game is first available to play, and that's the day that the "early access" starts. People who paid more aren't playing early, they're playing on day 1 while people who paid less are only being allowed to play on day 3 or 4 or 5. I won't participate if I know about it. If paying the full $60 or $70 doesn't let me play on day 1, if they're going to make me wait because I didn't pay the additional "play on day 1" tax? Then I just don't buy the game at launch. If I don't get to play on day 1 anyway, I might as well wait a month or two and grab the game for $30 instead. They want to play stupid games with the release date, I'll award them the stupid prize of making far less of my money. I definitely agree that this is one of the worst monetization trends the industry is going through right now.
I still remember the first time I encountered this garbage. I was home sick from work. Gears 5 had just launched and I was seeing reviews that said it was pretty good. So I thought screw it, I'll buy it so I have something to entertain myself with while sick. But then I saw that $60 didn't let me play on that day, I needed an $80 version if I didn't want to wait another couple of days. I didn't buy anything, I waited until it was on sale instead.
SEGA was even doing this for a while. I was really looking forward to Lost Judgment, but oops! SEGA pulled the delayed access scam with it. So I waited a little and got it for $30 instead of the $60 I would have been willing to pay if $60 had let me play on day one.
I don't care what publisher, I don't care how hyped I am for any given game. I will *_NEVER_* intentionally support this delayed access garbage.
It's funny, because I see a lot of people asking "well why don't people just wait for sales?" and the answer is often that playing the game alongside everyone is almost a cultural experience. If it's online, it can even mean playing it at the peak of its entire life time. So you pay the 'extra' of full price to be a part of that experience.
Seems like someone somewhere heard that and saw profit to be made. Now that 'cultural experience' is going to cost extra. What a load of bullshit, lol
@@Johnnyb3g00d If you're not a streamer whose income relies upon being first to market with trending content, you wait for a sale. Lotta folks who failed the marshmallow test when they were toddlers and still fail it as adults.
I will believe Ubisoft when they punish those in charge for the abuse their employees suffered and stop with all the micro transaction BS and 347 "collector editions" for each game
Sympathies to Ubisoft's artists and devs, riding out the leadership's finding out phase.
You know what one of ubisoft's biggest problems is? They have 19,000 employees.
Let me put this in perspective :
1. Nintendo has around 7,000
2. Activision blizzard had 13,000 before being acquired and now has 5,000
3. Rockstar has 5,700
Literally everyone and their grandmother is working at Ubisoft! While I don't want to see thousands of people suddenly lose their job, my God Ubisoft is bloated!
You saying The Crew is "going strong" is such an absurdly wrong statement as to undermine the credibility of the entire video.
That game is quite famous for being, y'know, *gone?!* How can you count that in their favor and not against them?
The Crew 2 and The Crew: Motorfest are and have been well supported. Was referring to franchise as a whole.
@@SecondWindGroup That's worse. You mentioned Rainbow Six: Siege and For Honor, neither of which are entire franchises, but individual games. It's only reasonable to assume the others were also referencing individual games. Because going by the whole franchise doesn't help. The Division had an entire beta-stage game canned, Rainbow Six: Extraction has... Well, nothing, and The Crew's already lost an entire game.
The context of that comment is "if you had asked me a few years ago..."
There was a time when The Crew was a game that existed. It wasn't even that long ago.
Ubisoft has been crap to me for a LONG time. But to be fair, I despise online games and open world games. So, really, they just don't make stuff I am going to care about.
I don't mind open world games. But they should be open for a reason. Not just for the sake of being big.
For instance, I consider the World of Assassination games to be 'Open World'. Just a very small world that understands the point of its environment.
I know this is about overall unisoft, but I think it is still think the whole Yasuke issue is an issue because its Ubisoft. I dont trust Ubisoft to do a tasteful story about him and they have no logical place in a stealth game. It feels like a pick purely for clout rather than actually caring.
If another studio said they were making a sengoku jidai game about Nobunaga's retainers including Yasuke Id be all for it.
Yasuke was in Nioh, no one noticed or cared because the game wasn't clearly pushing an agenda and he was a throwaway background character, just like in real life!
@@Thanatos2k I think Ubisoft wanted to make Afro Samurai, I mean seriously- they unironically blast hip hop music during fighting scenes- I wouldn't be surprised if they do something like Need for Speed with the graffiti effects too
it's funny how no one cared about historical inaccuracy until Shadow. Valhalla is comically historically inaccurate, with some of the worst misconceptions and stereotypes about the Norse. but suddenly Yasuke is too unrealistic. the only weird thing about Yasuke is that they are making him a playable character, not an NPC, as they usually do with historical characters. but they found a loophole to have a black protagonist, and it was a good one, so give them some credit.
also AC was NEVER a stealth game, maybe the first game, MAYBE, but it was always an action game with stealth mechanic. what is interesting about shadow is that they are splitting action and stealth between two characters, and making the stealth mechanics better.
@@danilooliveira6580 everything you've said I fundamentally disagree with.
Literally the only thing I care about in AC is the history. The modern stories and animus and such are garbage. Anything past 2 has been bad.
Ubisoft is a trash studio that wants brownie points to try and save their dying studio cause they're bad at making games.
I think that's the point though. It sounds like Shadows is trying to come up with a synthesis between the conflicting goals of the franchise by giving you two protagonist that represent the two extremes. Yasuke is the direct warrior, smash things up protagonist, and Naoe is the stealth Ninja protagonist.
Yasuke literally CANNOT stealth. While Naoe stands no chance in a head to head fight.
First and foremost, Ubisoft stopped caring about what the customers actually wanted. All Ubisoft wanted was to make money, and they looked at what other corporations found to be the optimal strategy for making money. They didn't try to market to actual customers, to find the niches that would make them money, they looked at how the current success stories worked and tried to clone them. They even did this with *their own games,* trying to recapture the success that made previous games of theirs sell well. And you know what they say about making a copy of a copy.
I can only remember two Ubisoft titles I've played "lately". A few years ago I had fun in Rainbow Six Siege for a few months. Apart from that, Grow Home is the only thing I can remember. I just checked, and that was released in 2015 it seems.
If only they had spent some of their piles of cash on cultivating a few smaller teams of gamers, letting them make the games they wanted to make, and not just going blind on trying to earn absolutely all of the money. If they go under, it's a shame for all the people working there and just doing what they're ordered to do, but I can't imagine anyone really missing their game releases at this point.
I really like most Ubisoft games, and like them to be formulaic. When I buy a FC game, I want more of what I know and love, with some cool changes. If I want something different, I'll play a different series like AC or GR. I think the push for live service is its biggest issue.
We're truly arrive at a time where expecting a game that's bugs free, playable and completed in day 1 is considered "unrealistic"
To be honest, I'm guessing they're going to double down on the trend chasing and start going for mobile games instead.
All I think of when hearing "Ubisoft" is when those game devs called out Elden RIng for having poor ui/ux.
That's not even just hypocritical, it's petty.
5:56 Sure it was! It was fun. However over the last 5 years there have been dozens of games AS good, sold for $19.99. Ubisoft spent AAA money to make an indie game, and then asked AAA money for it
I personally think Ubisoft's problems go back further than the last five years of trend-chasing. Pushing Assassin's Creed out too regularly reduced both the quality and the impact of the titles. Too many similar open-world games with mission markers, and too many micotransactions. The purported move to take the stock private does make sense, because without that shareholder expectation the company can make more sensible investment decisions rather than chasing the profit line that goes up endlessly. And that will probably mean new IP and revisiting old ones.
Oh trust me, in this case, the shareholders have been acting as guardrails against Yves Guillemot's worst ideas. Ubisoft's investments into NFTs? The Game-as-a-Service business models? Those went through with Yves's enthusiastic approval
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who saw the writing on the wall before everyone else did. Ubisoft, bethesda, CD Projekt red (specifically with the game cyberpunk 2077 although I never had issues with the glitches. I disliked that game for a number of other issues I won't get into.) And even hello games (BEFORE NO MAN'S SKY WAS FIXED!) I saw all the games these companies were putting out and said to myself .... yeah no. There is absolutely ZERO chance these are going to be anything like they say they will be.
Right? Like I haven't purchased games from them in over a decade, so this is basically unsurprising to me.
@@Johnnyb3g00d Granted I can admit that those last 2 have at least made the effort to fix the issues (and hello games I really can't blame cause they were under time constraints and a bunch of other stuff. See internet historian's the engoodening of no man's sky) but bethesda, ubisoft, Microsoft and a number of other developers. They have to REALLY put out a good game to get me to fork out a cent. Even nintendo has been questionable lately imo.
Not only game companies refuse to learn from their mistakes, but apparently games journalist, game creators and GAMERS themselves seems to not learn from the past. Everything that you guys keep saying about the problem with chasing the live service goose is just a reharshed higher budget version of what happened in the 2000 with every single company or franchise trying to cash in on MMORPGs and launch their WoWkiller.
And when I warned people that chasing these online trends would be the bane of videogames, people called me a hater.
Prince of Persia was amazing. I just beat it and I think I enjoyed it more than Metroid Dread.
I stopped buying Ubisoft games a long time ago because of the formulaic nature of most of their products and all the scandals that have wracked the company for years. It would take a lot for me to come back to the company, even if AC Shadows is the AC game setting I always wanted to see them do, but the points you describe from their memo are small steps in that direction. We'll see what happens next.
Maybe people just don't like paying $70 for free-fo-play game design
Back in the PS2 era, I remember being quite fond of Ubisoft. When I played the first Assassin's Creed and it ended in a cliffhanger, they were dead to me. That was the ultimate example of putting the business over the art or experience or player satisfaction: they wanted a hook to get you to buy the next one, and the fact that, if the game failed, the players would be left with an incomplete story wasn't a concern.
Eh? I don't think that makes any sense. Kingdom Hearts ends on a cliffhanger, as an example. Just because the story wasn't told in one singular package doesn't automatically mean the game was cut to shreds just to set up sequels. It would've been frankly a pretty bloated game if we got the conclusion to Desmonds story in the first game when the whole... *thing* with Assassins Creed is telling two stories at once. And ftr, it wasn't on the PS2.
I too think Assassin's Creed 1 was the best Assassin's Creed game. It was about actually planning and executing assassinations, not historical fan fiction nonsense and side activity bloat that came later.
AC3 when they couldn't even wrap up the present day storyline was the last game I bought from Ubisoft because it was clear that the series would never end. They had no plan for the present day storyline and 2012 (the "doomday" year the plot was hyping) already passed in real life, because they had spent so much time making additional games that they couldn't finish the story in time.
@@Thanatos2k "Not Historical Fanfiction" - The first assassins creed is literally about a bunch of modern conspiracy theories interweaving with the Crusades. Though I do think the Ezio Trilogy was the height of the franchise and that they could have just ended things with Black Flag on a high note.
@@SeisoYabai I would debate the differences between how AC1 was ended vs KH1, as if that were any defense, and where to draw the lines on what's artful vs greedy... but I don't need to.
Whether it was remarkable insight or coincidental development, my stance on their shitty attitudes toward their consumers ("players") was validated... 5-20 sequels ago? Did they ever "tell the story of Desmond"? As I understand it, he was unceremoniously killed off, and "the real world" just hung around as a lazy framing device. And since then, they've turned the entire franchise into a formulaic, grindy cash-grab.
@@brittb1696 Oh absolutely, I'm not arguing that you were wrong, per se. Just that you jumped the gun a bit. AC2 and Brotherhood were still great games, and everything up to Black Flag (where I stopped) still had SOME merit. I'm only saying it's an oddly premature place to say they were setting up for a cashgrab, especially since AC1 is a bit of a niche title
happy early birthday Second Wind
I guess they were right in telling us to get used to not owning their games.
Ubisoft needs to release abridged versions of their games. Shorter, tighter, and somehow better. I would pay money for that. Though really I shouldn't have to as that is what we should have gotten in the first place.
Hmm. They could take out the open world, make it mission based with cutscenes and dialogue explaining things going on in between "missions". It would end up like Thief 1 & 2, and that's not a bad thing.
Good news: after noticing that some players are annoyed by the need to do open world stuff to level up and progress the story, the added a purchasable exp boosters to skip that grind. There you have it, started with AC:origins in 2017. The abridged version you were willing to pay for.
That last point is right on the money! Gamers expect this because traditionally the SDLC didn’t govern all of gaming with its wireframe release model. Games are not just functional pieces of software where users only need the bare minimum and can wait for patches and a developer roadmap. These are luxury items. And promising good stuff down the road doesn’t mean a lot when what you present on day 1 is meh.
People DO want that type of open world experience, they just DON'T want it to feel meaningless empty and vapid.
I feel like Ubisoft execs shat their pants when Sony revealed a Ghost of Tsushima sequel that launches in the same year as their game.
Fact: 90% of game developers quit right before releasing the game that's going to kill fortnite
The internal sexual harassment and exploitation ring by the upper management was the last straw for me. I don't just not buy Ubisoft, but won't even play the games I -own- have licenses for, I am so disgusted.
It's like House Frey after the Red Wedding, I'm waiting for the point that it falls, and maybe then I'll see what Clint Hocking is doing.
Then there was the whole "customers should get used to not owning their games" bullshit.
I haven't bought a Ubisoft game in about 7 years and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
This is what you get for delisting Driver San Francisco.
Ubisoft only now realizing that their customers want their games to work on day 1 instead of having to wait weeks for a fix is very telling.
The sad reality is that a company the size of Ubisoft needs live service revenue to handle the ups and downs behind new IPs. EA has sports and APEX, Take-Two has NBA and GTA Online, and so on. Either they have to downsize or find some recurring revenue.
all of ubisoft has been carried by R6 constant revenue for years. they've been trying to get more games like that, but getting a live service game to actually click with an audience is lightning in a bottle. you just can't force it to happen. you need to make a good thing first and hope that everything falls into place.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind Ubisoft going out of business so other companies get a big shock, and make games that gamers want, and thus buy.
I always enjoy Nick's takes on the industry, good stuff!
It'll take far more than one internal memo to make me even consider Ubisoft leadership will get their shit together.
And with all the shit they've let hit the fan, you shouldn't either.
I definitely hope that they make the positive changes that they need. Well gwysoft has been the model for same games coming out over the past 10 years or so. But I have really high hopes for shadows if only because I love that style of gameplay and bring it back to the classic assassin's creed model would really make it a whole lot of fun. I also particularly love that time period and would like to see what the game could do with it😊
Such a bummer that The Lost Crown underperformed in sales. It was the first GREAT Ubisoft game in a LONG time, making its lack of sales a huge missed opportunity to remind Ubisoft that we care about quality.
"Bigger but not better" is so fucking true. I loved the Assassin's Creed games, and for a while I was determined to 100% all of them. But starting with Unity they started bloating the games with so fucking much filler that it got insane. It felt like they wanted to punish me for the horrendously arrogant act of thinking I could play all they have made for the game. Some of the games take over 100 hours to 100%. And most of it isn't even fun. It's blatantly auto-generated crap that's just there to waste your time.
This is how I felt all the way back in Assassins Creed. Every city had the exact same set of submissions to prepare for the main assassination. Things get better with the subsequent games as more variety was added. But then the games got even bigger. Plus, at some point, I'd rather play a dedicated puzzle game than have a mediocre puzzle game jammed into my adventure game.
@@Bustermachine Yes. The first AC game was basically a proof of concept that they improved upon a lot in the later games. But when I was working towards 100% in Origins I felt nostalgia to the days of collecting like 600 flags in AC1, because looking for the flags was honestly more fun and varied than the endless side missions in Origins.
I haven’t purchased a Ubisoft game in quite awhile. Black Flag was the last Assassins Creed game I bothered with, and I’ve dipped my toe just a bit into the For Honor pool. But, mainly because of the controversies, I haven’t even considered giving them money much at all.
They could start by giving everyone who purchased The Crew back the ability to PLAY THE DAMN GAME!
ultra polished is something for a company that is known for shipping broken messes and never fixing it properly while also having it so formulaic that it always feels like a 20€ skin upgrade to the old game.
Which they also sell in every game.
I haven't bought a ubislop game in over a decade and don't think I will ever again except they drastically change
On paper, Star Wars Outlaws is 1:1 the Star Wars game I've wanted for a while, but when it was announced it was being developed by Ubisoft it torpedoed any of my interest knowing how formulaic and reliant on busy work their games have become.
A shame, but the company today is a 'Far Cry' from the one that produced some of my favorite games in Beyond Good and Evil, the Sand of Time Trilogy, and early Assassin's Creed.
Second Wind graphics team working overtime on that "golden goose"!
I miss when Far Cry was an open-world sandbox about a guy with mutant superpowers and had an amazing map editor that you could actually play in multiplayer. None of this boring outpost/tower crap.
Crafsman, here on UA-cam, has an episode of Steady Craftin where he goes into how, since he was an 80s gamer, he'd never heard of dlc.
His take was much the same as you pointed out. We want a finished product.
Imagine having quality standards that are so low, that as a company, they equate gamers wanting a game that works on day one (with no need for a day 1 patch) and that doesn't have game-breakings bugs as gamers having "Ultra high" expectations.
3:15
Correction ! While ubisoft did lay off some people in the past few years, that's exceptionnally rare for them.
They are "the big studio that doesn't lay off" in the industry, if you land a job at Ubisoft on a permanent contract, you are set for life.
Recently they had to lay off 45 and 120 people from offices that needed to close and services that had to be cut. That is true, but it didn't impact their creative talent since it was in customer support and other business areas.
That 1700 number you show on this frame is NOT about lay offs !
It's about what they call a period of "natural attrition", meaning it's a period where they don't replace staff that goes away and are more strict with temporary contracts renewals.
That's their philosophy: they take the risk of getting "too big", and once in a while they reduce their numbers by seeing where redundancies can go without being replaced.
Ubisoft is a very unique company in the industry. They are not controlled by investors as much as people seem to think.
The Guillemot brothers have all the power, for better, and for worse. But I definitely believe having them resign and putting a stock market puppet in their place would be a worse catastrophy for them.
I think the main issue is that we’ve all taken the official Ubisoft advice and have gotten used to not owning Ubisoft games.
"Players need to get used to not owning their games"
Ubisoft needs to get used to people not "buying" their games licenses
My biggest worry is Ubisoft collapsing during the backlash about a black lead in a game set in feudal Japan will empower the "go woke go broke" idiots.
Pretty much. It's the only thing that's causing me to feel any strong emotion over what's going on in gaming right now.
And the "treat Japanese history with respect" idiots! There's even a nation full of them, somewhere near China. Don't they realize there are boxes to be checked?
12 battle royales in development is fucking insanity, goddamn
I do wonder how much better the industry would be if budgets were lower and devs made the games they wanted to make.
For example, the Rayman devs *loved* their work. They even campaigned when Rayman Legends was delayed on WiiU to make space for a multiformat release. They just wanted people to play the game as soon as they were promised they could.
You can’t tell me for one minute that devs want to make the same open world, live service games over and over again.
Ubisoft is too busy telling consumers what they want, instead of listening to the fans trying to tell them what they want.
To Feb 2025?
Oh god... they're gonna try to capitalize on "black history month" aren't they? 🤦♂️
I feel the only one that is somewhat happy about recent events not only with Ubisoft is Gabe Newell and Valve after Ubisoft figured it was good to release the game on Steam to maybe get some more money. Me personally couldnt care less about Ubisoft unless maybe Beyond Good And Evil 2 turns out to be something besides another vapourware rumour.
While its social feux pas aren't the primary driver in many of these L's, you can't overlook it as a contributing factor. Not consulting actual Japanese historians about a history intensive Japanese story paired with pulling actual historical symbols such as flags THAT ARE STILL USED without at least asking alienates large swaths of possible customers.
Ubisoft’s internal drama has been more interesting than their games.
The last one i’ve played was their Far Cry Primal game. That had an interesting concept.
Immortals Fenyx Rising was surprisingly decent for me. After they announced the cancellation of a successor-title I lost all interest in the studio.
I love that their solution is 'well we have 10 more slop jank Creed games ready to launch in the next 3 years'
I often wonder if they're intentionally dropping the share price for a buy back or a pump and dump.
Love the insight on offer here. Just a note to the editor: watching this at fullscreen was a pretty poor experience, with really low detail and bitrates. This might have had to do with the methods of capture used for the gameplay/trailers/etc. I'm not sure if the UA-cam Premium "enhanced bit rate" would have helped, as it wasn't present for this video. Sorry I don't have any ideas on what to do about fixing this :(