@@chasemarrison6272 valve just put a new game out in early access like, a month or so ago, yeah they still make games. and before that they released half life alyx in 2020, and on TOP of that they still update a lot of their games actively :P
I saw someone say something to the effect of "Triple A game companies breaking down is a sign that the industry is HEALING." Edit: For clarification, I am not talking about Nintendo, people. Calm down. I'm talking about greedy corporations like Ubisoft. Which is the topic of the video.
More a sign of changing times. All the same principles of ecology apply here. All the old apex predators are locked into a specialized method of survival, but as soon as the environment changes, that method no longer bears fruit. All the small adaptable generalists then rise up to dethrone them, eventually becoming apex predators themselves, and the cycle continues.
100%. Indies are the ones keeping the true spirit of video games alive, those teams are the size and budget of the ones who were making your DOOMs and Daggerfalls back in the day.
There are very few major game studios these days making games as I feel they should be. Off the top of my head, I can think of Atlus, Team Asobi, certain Nintendo studios…I’m sure there’s more but the fact that I can’t think of them is pretty grim.
i wish it was proper punishment. likely, the execs actually responsible will get exorbitant exit payments and a large chunk of the devs who worked their butts off to implement those stupid ideas will get unceremoniously fired.
Funny you posted this just now. My employer has an office in Paris and I have developers on my team who are based there. Which is where I am, right now, catching up with them. One of those developers, I hired away from Ubisoft (Star Wars was actually the last thing he touched before he left). And tonight over dinner he gave us his inside perspective on this very topic. What he described is very concerning, because in fact he does not think it is Yves Guillemot who is the problem, or at least, not intentionally. He described Yves as someone who comes around daily, chatting with developers, getting their perspectives, and showing real concern and passion for making and playing games. This sounds good, but it is in fact BAD, because it means that instead something has gone wrong, which he is no longer in control of. The ship has lost its rudder, causing the captain to appear to be a demented madman, running around smashing into things, when in reality he’s just a poor old man panicking and trying to figure out why his ship doesn’t go where he wants anymore. The real problem, according to him, is a cancer that crept in from the marketing department. A number of people who were just pure marketing and spreadsheet driven who don’t know games, who saw an opportunity to bully their way up the ladder, and have now become a widespread infection across all of the upper management beneath Guillemot. He thinks even if Guillemot tried to take action now it is too late, because the cancer has spread so deeply that it would be hard to even know who to fire, and you would definitely miss some of them, and probably fire good people by mistake as well. He described some pretty ugly experiences with these people. They are not gamers. They have no love for games or any sense of what makes them fun. Many of them, despite starting out in non-production roles like marketing or accounting, have successfully bullied their way up into positions of production decision making. They are invading the development teams constantly with demands for formulaic “it worked before, put it everywhere” features. I wish it was a joke. He said that line producers (people who are supposed to float between games and give constructive feedback or a little bit of perspective on market trends, etc. to help identify tweaks to a game direction) have essentially become a roving band of game vandals, who show up, see a prototype of something new and unique, and insist that it be shoved full of open world towers, brainless side quests, and micro-transactions. He did not think even going private will fix it. He thinks the company is so widely infected with this that there is no longer any way to sort out the good from the bad, and it’s just going to continue to get worse. Guillemot is essentially just a figurehead now, and the inmates are running the asylum. Probably the only fix is for the company to crash and burn, so that it’s no longer of interest to the people who were only in it for a way to climb the ladder, and then just to hope that the people left behind can rescue something from the ashes.
Marketers and people from accounting are also to blame for why cinema and tv shows are also declining in quality on average. The problem is we have given our whole society over to the bean counting algorithm and the soulless people who consult and manage it.
@@c0mpu73rguy I wouldn't feel TOO bad he was still leading the company when it's employees were getting abused for years and basically did nothing about it until it became public
Even wilder they threw them into the Ghost Recon game nobody bought at launch because it was broken as fuck and full of false marketing Even funnier is that the NFTs hit just as the Devs turned the game around so it basically killed the small revival it had
Perfect example of why shareholders are a problem. Shareholders get excited about new technology and ask why it isn't in a product that has nothing to do with that new technology. Businesses then lie or try to pivot to keep the investor money. And then suddenly you have toasters quote unquote powered by AI
@@duskyer I'm well aware that a good number of them have probably been fired. Note the latter half of my statement in the previous comment. Did you think that meant exclusively under Ubisoft? Ubisoft is a repugnant organization and I truly wish the best for those who want to keep their jobs, might have been fired or are looking for jobs elsewhere. That is the thrust of what I said without subtlety.
0:10 i like to just hear you speak your mind. Its nice to just talk games sometimes. I dont get to talk about game related stuff with people usually so this is kind of filling that void i have so please do keep posting
Problem with the positivity with the private argument: Ubisoft is still being run by its founders. They've been the ones at the forefront of both the abuse and scummy business practices of the company. It just means that Ubisoft will be defacto run by the people who headed projects like skull and bones.
honestly my perception of ubisoft going private is to deal with debt and essentially try to get the french goverment or some investor to essentially save the company and go public again.
I believe a good example of going private and not benefiting/improving from it is Bungie after breaking free from Activision and before the Sony buyout. Because during that period they were private, they made decisions that would land them in the hot water that they've been in for the past year. It's not a matter of if its private or public, it's the leadership in charge who can influence their company weather its positive or negative
@@hadessonjamesnot all evil, but certainly a lot of the evil we face. At the end of the day it's all about equity of power or lack thereof. Great power imbalance allows for domination and abuse which in our current system that's usually taking the form of money/capital
I can’t stop my friends from playing almost nothing but slop lol. Mostly Call of Duty and stuff of that nature. I’m at least trying to put them on to some fantastic games so they can see what else is out there.
Forcing people to play or not to play things isn't the answer. It ruins friendships over the most trivial of matters. However, you're not wrong. The more people continue to buy bad-faith products, the more it emboldens these corpos to continue milking people with bad-faith products. They get comfortable with pushing their trash because they know idiots will keep buying it. The only way to teach someone without an open mind is to let them fail. Let them continue to buy trash because they are trash. Only in mistakes does someone learn. My best friend used to be someone that would buy the sloppiest games of all time, and he disregarded a lot of my concerns in the beginning. After realizing I was right, he doesn't preorder anymore, he waits for reviews, he makes note of good studios, and he gets second opinions from me and other friends whom have our hands on the pulse of gaming. He feels a lot better about what he's playing these days, and the burnout he was starting to feel dissipated because he has faith in the studios he enjoys now. I won't stop someone that loves buying mounts every week on WoW, or a helplessly toxic CoD player, because they're in the ecosystems they belong in. I don't want people like that in my communities causing problems. Fortunately they keep to their lanes well if not disturbed.
Remember when Ubisoft would publish weird Japanese games in the West so they would get international releases? I remember those days. I respected Ubisoft a lot then. So disappointing to see what they've become.
But the charts! The charts clearly say that consumers consume the exact same game over and over and over and over! There is no common sense, only charts!
@@Tyrany42 It works if each iteration of that same game is at least up to a bar of quality that will keep the majority of your player base satisfied (not wowed, just satisfied), but unfortunately Ubisoft is having issues even getting up to that bar.
@@DeeptunesterNah, Avatar and Star Wars Outlaws were about as competent as your average Ubisoft game, and they didn’t move that many copies. Skull and Bones was more disappointing after the mega delay and only ship combat so that makes sense. But I think people are tired of even the competent warmed over Ubisoft formula with whatever licensed IP slapped on it
If they sink, I'm glad we at the very least got another Mario + Rabbids game before those guys jumped ship. They clearly had a ton of passion for Sparks of Hope and it was a real shame that very high quality game didn't do well.
Tbh I played both mario + rabbids games and the first one was great but sparks of hopes just wasn't as good, the free-form movement quest system and a lot of minor changes just didn't click with me, I never finished it
@@shrezinpumking8038 The second is definitely a departure from the major tactical aspect I agree, but I think it has a lot of great strategy and ideas in its own right
I agree, privatization does seem like a good idea, but I'd still be concerned about the jerk running the company. Even with it private, he could still run it into the ground which is sad. 😓
how about the people responsible being punished and having to work at Wendy's instead of receiving golden parachutes ? Responsibility and all that stuff rich people constantly get to tell the workers?
Yep, a Ubisoft game is like buying an empty hot dog bun to eat. It works in a pinch if there’s nothing in the pantry and you’re hungry late at night. That’s it
Arlo, Star Wars is imploding just as badly as Ubisoft. The IP is all but dead. The toys ain't selling. People are not flocking to Disney+ to watch the shows. You would think a theme hotel based off Star Wars would do very well. It did so poorly that it was shut down in less than 5 years.
Sad, considering I loved Bad Batch, Tales of the Jedi, and Andor. However, I think the Acolyte has finally proved Disney isn't worthy to continue the franchise. I'm not salty Lucas signed that paper (especially since Lucas Star Wars had issues itself), but the time to pass on torch (or even end the franchise) has come.
@@batmanbud2 All the animated shows were great. The live action stuff just kept going downhill after Season 02 of The Mandalorian. They kept doing 'bait & switch' with it. The Obi-wan show wasn't even about Obi-wan, it was about Leia & some inquisitor no one cares about. They kept misrepresenting the lore, pushing political messages, etc. This is all the stuff CW did with their DC shows & the viewership tanked, yet for some reason they just keep doing it. It's gotten to a point where they don't even want to make a good show or movie anymore, they just want to keep pushing their politics & that's not entertainment. It's brainwashing & people know it.
@@Crazy_Gamer_OG Reuniting Grogu and Din so quickly was a bad decision, and in a different show no less. Imagine somebody 15 years from now binging the Mandalorian from the first time and after the big emotional goodbye at the end of season 2 and in the next episode Grogu is just there.
The Hotel was also marketed terribly and priced insanely. For a thorough deep dive i recommend people watch Jenny Nicholson video essay/ review as she was able to go to make a video on it before it closed and does a good job deep diving into the faults of the project from the get go!
This should be a wake up call to slow down on assassin creed and put some time into other franchises for a while, not just rayman since Ubisoft has a large catalog of ip’s
I heard in another video that they just announced they have 10 Assassin's Creed projects on the way. The corporate thing to do in this situation is not to take risks on old IP or develop new IP, it's to go down to the slop mines.
Might and Magic: Olden Era is in the pipeline right now, and they greenlit Archon Games to create a warhammer-esque miniature line for the IP in the board gaming space.
By the looks of it the biggest privately owned game companies are Valve, Epic, IO Interactive, and from there it's all smaller companies like Supergiant. Even then some "privately owned" ones have a % from Tencent or otherwise.
Interestingly, becoming a publicly traded company is what killed Maxis. They wound up having to have a board of directors that forced them to make like 6 different games in one year, and the team wasn't big enough to do this, so all the games either got canned or turned out to be really buggy and fell short of the creative vision. The worst game was Streets of SimCity, which had a great premise but was released in basically an unplayable state. Maxis then began to sink and Electronic Arts bought them
The moment I realized Ubisoft isn’t for me anymore is when I downloaded the demo for prince of Persia the lost crown and I couldn’t even get past the title screen without the demo trying to get me to make a Ubisoft account for a demo bro 🤦♂️
I'm tired of having to make an account for anything these days, especially when you're asked to make a different account when you already used one to purchase the game in the first place. Now suddenly I need to make another just to play it.
Creating an account takes like 2 mins. Its annoying when you are asked to login even after buying it from somewhere else. There should be an option to carry the saves and achievements to uplay in the games settings. Make it optional, like connecting twitch to some games.
@@Finnishmanni Yeah and that's the main issue, every time you launch the game from Steam, you wait a bit for the secondary launcher to launch, you log into the launched launcher, then you wait for the game to be launched by the secondary launcher, _THEN_ you get to play. And that's assuming their servers aren't having issues, which is more common from apps like Ubisoft Connect and the Rockstar launcher. It isn't a huge deal but its just inconvenient enough to become grating after a while.
One thing: in my limited knowledge of the stock market, people do not care about the dividende anymore. No, the returns are just too smalls for them. They just want to sell the shares for more money to other people. They want the line to go up. That's why they want endless growth! Infinite money from infinite players! For that line to keep going up, and for people to get to sell the shares for money. That's (I think) the sentiment. No betting on the company's long term performance or get steady revenue. Just hoping the line goes up to sell.
The thing about employee treatment, I think, is best explained with the "magic table" scenario. Imagine you have a magic table that produces $10,000 of completely legal cash every day. Most of us would pay off our debts, help out friends, maybe get some nicer things, but eventually we'd probably wind up giving out cash to charity or something. A billionaire would use that $10,000 to *try to find a second magic table*, and if you don't think like that you will never BE a billionaire. It's all about racking up the high score far beyond the point personal comfort or even power could possibly matter.
Its 10x better than giving into shareholders who publicly declared that their mission is to "create profit above all else". Problem is if they can survive the hurdle.
@@chiquita683currently they are relying on investor money that they can't rely on, and people are gonna lose jobs either way. while obviously nobody should lose their jobs imo the better option is to bite the bullet and go private, where they can manage their money better and less people have to lose their jobs in the future
It's damn near time one of these big time publishers goes under, the fact that they are being brought to their hands and knees is a sign that gaming is healing and that they'll have to produce actual entertainment, not shitty time wasters anymore.
People said that a decade ago when THQ went belly up and now THQ's assets are part of the Embracer Group, a far larger, far worse entity. Careful what you wish for.
@@pattersong6637embracer group is also going under (a lot of studios e.g gearbox got sold, coffee stain and tabletop division are footing the bill for ALL PREV PURCHASES basically)
Problem is once you're public going back into being privately owned is not easy. You'd basically need to buy back every single share any shareholder currently has (or at least a majority, and then you can force the rest to sell) and that's gonna be extremely expensive, especially for a failing company
15:01 "Usually a ship that big takes a lot to sink" Background footage of the entire video: Trying to sink a really big ship Well played, Arlo. Well played.
The sad thing is that instead of chasing trends, Ubisoft has a huge and diverse portfolio IP that they didn't need to put all of their eggs into a single live service basket. Without the need to chase after shareholders demanded trends, they could have comfortably cruise by with a new non-live service Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy, and Far Cry game every three year, so they'll have a big franchise game every year, while keeping one or two multiplayer and live service game running, and funding a few small projects as experiments and extra cash flow like the Rayman or Rabbids games.
They did do that. The problem is that they homogenized Far Cry and Assassins Creed into one and dropped Splinter Cell so their AAA output became a blob
Many companies thought that the covid numbers would stay, which is one of the many issues Ubisoft faces now. The games being all nearly the same is another.
I love the content on this channel. You're one of the only people on this platform that i trust when it comes to game/nintendo related news. I never expect any clickbait and all of your content is very interesting and entertaining to watch. Keep it up👍
he's the exact right balance of knowledgeable and likeable, and he's unafraid of sharing his own unfiltered opinions. pretty much my default nintendo youtuber at this point.
Sorry Arlo but i will not give Ubisoft this escuse , Nintendo is a publicly traded company,and they don't do what Ubisoft does,a lot of them are a publicly traded company, and they don't have this problem. I blame the entirety of the leadership team on Ubisoft for they trouble. No one is to blame other than Ubisoft.
Ubisoft reminds me of the dude in Hellraiser- A hundred hooks in his skin, pulling him apart in different directions. It didn’t end well for Frank either.
Yep. Don't know how "big" they are in terms of employees and income. BG3 certainly raked in the dough, but it's also an outlier for them. They've just been consistently turning out solid games.
@@Xeno426 To be fair, private ownership also comes with a fair number of risks. It does let you create what you want to create, but it means you have fewer options for financial lifelines. And there's no guarantee a private studio won't also go insane.
I'm in huge favor of companies going private usually because investors make absurd demands, but with Ubisoft it wouldn't fix much as long as Yves Guillemot is CEO.
3:55 you can walk right up to a stormtrooper on the hardest difficulty, as he warns you to stop, and he WON'T shoot you. Outlaws WAS a gimme, but they just fucked it over THAT BAD.
Reason why Star Wars Outlaw isn't doing well isn't just an Ubisoft Dev problem, it's also a Disney management problem. Their both in the same sinking ship right now.
Publictly owned companies have their issues, but companies that go from public to private usually end up much worse. The reason is that they end up being bought using debt, and new owners use company's profits to pay back that debt rather than reinvest it to make the company better. Maybe if they end up being bought by another big game company(instead of a financial firm) they may end up better, but the few ones that could buy them are public so that wouldn't count as going private.
Companies have to understand that a live service competes with any other live service, even if they're different genres. They compete for player population, but it's just an oversaturated market. People interested in your live service are already playing a different one.
I just binge-watched Pirates of the Caribbean, and there's a quote from Jack Sparrow to Barbossa that reminds me of what Ubisoft has become. Barbossa: " The world used to be bigger." Jack replied: "The world is the same, there's just less in it." Ubisoft used to pump out games like Splinter Cell, Assassin Creed, and Far Cry; it just now says they got lazy with them.
0:36 Hey Arlo, listen. Is talking about this stuff petty? Maybe. But do I greatly enjoy listening to you talking about this stuff? Yes, absolutely. So don’t worry about it 😊
In my country, there is this chain of gaming stores where you can also trade in games with them for cash and there I noticed Ubisoft's decline too. They lowered the prices of Ubisoft games and barely give any cash for them anymore. For example: They offer 30 bucks for a used copy of Tears of the Kingdom, but Prince of Persia or Mario + Rabbids is just 8.
For Star Wars outlaws ironically I think that had far more to do with Disney then Ubisoft. It wasn’t great but is wasn’t awful ither it was just mid, but a mid star wars game, especially a signal player one sense we haven’t had one in a bit, should have sold well. But Disney has managed to poison the biggest media franchise in the world so badly that nobody wants anything to do with the ip these days, especially on the already toxic Ubisoft.
the entire industry in general needs to go back to smaller games... If one game/project can screw over your company, it's not a good project. Doesn't need to be indie developer small, but. y'know. Don't be the farm on one game. The general population doesn't need 8k games and ultrarealistic graphics. Just give us some fun cartoony stylized stuff, that won't cost a billion dollars to develop.
8:35 The largest private gaming company is undoubtedly Valve but I understand if you sort of put them in a separate category. But still, compare Valve's decisions to the Big 3 and I do think you see a difference between publicly traded tomfoolery vs. privately owned enterprise. I'd never claim it's some kind of panacea for a company's worst capitalist tendencies, but I do believe it helps keep a company focused on the proper set of incentives. Nintendo famously, despite being publicly traded, acts more similar to a old-fashioned private enterprise through sheer force of brand, will and reputation -- their reward is a load of conflict with shareholders. I remember reading interviews about their shareholders giving them grief over their decision to raise employee wages 10% to help counteract inflation.
To answer your question about the largest game publisher/developer/studio: The answer, by a mile, is Valve which, even with conservative estimates, is worth 2-4x what Ubisoft is and has an unprecedentedly high cost to revenue ratio that I'm not sure any other publisher could even pretend to approach.
This is why we need universal basic income. If people aren't afraid that their family will be homeless if they lose their jobs, employers might have to think twice before they abuse their staff so hard that the company falls apart
3:40 Ubisoft (and Disney for that matter) seemed to have forgotten that if you put out a product PEOPLE HAVE TO WANT IT! Star Wars Outlaws selling (estimated) in selling just over a million copies means very little. The previous Star Wars games being SW Jedi: Series and SW Battlefront sold absolute LAPS around SW Outlaws and they had their own issues surrounding their launches.
4:15 this is definitely part of the problem. I used to pray for my games to be massive 100+ hour open world adventures. However, those have become so exhausting over time. I much prefer 10-20 hour games I can play in 1-2 weeks like Astro Bot or small experiences I can play over a rainy weekend like Unpacking, Toem, Abzu, Lego Builder’s Journey etc.
So the thing about the profit incentive of a public company is that "in theory", the thing which is best for their customers, or at least something "pretty good", should be the most profitable for the company, at least in the long term. But the problem is that there is typically no incentive to maximize the long-term profitability; most investors want growth right now, and most CEO's don't last that long and get bonuses based on increased share price. So if they can get the share price to inflate a lot 'right now', collect their bonus, and then take a generous exit-package when things start getting bad and they want a new CEO, they'll do just that. I'm not sure what the solution to that is other than some massive restructuring of the economy and corporate law. Some companies do value long term growth though, it's really all down to whether the shareholders trust that long term growth is being achieved and if they trust the company enough to stick it out that long.
so what? they still have to pay back the money eventually. if the price of their stock falls before they pay the loan back, they are in deep trouble and have basically bankrupted their company
the latter is very likely the cause, just like concord normal people just don't care, most people don't know about any of the controversy, they just see the pattern in their quality and just buy a better game instead
Add in the third camp of people not knowing Ubisoft makes more than Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is awesome, but it was hard to gauge how many people knew about the game if they weren't already following people in love with Metroidvanias.
ubisoft is doing the equivalent of realizing their ship has sprung a leak, and then deciding itd be a good idea to pull out planks of wood from the hull to patch it up
This video is a perfect backdrop for this topic. I seriously thought it was skull and bones and only after a while I recognized this was Black Flag. And that's an 800 million dollar problem
I blame Ubisoft's downfall on Assassin's Creed. They realized they could make mediocre games that sell well as long as it had a bunch of meaningless content and decided all their games should be like that.
they were correct though the reason ubisoft is failing isnt because they realized they could just create mediocre games forever. companies have already known this fact for years, they arent stupid
Nah, im pretty sure Rayman and the Rabbids would be fine if they aren't forgotten, I'm sure some employees at Nintendo do see some potential for them after the success of the Mario + Rabbids games (hopefully theses sentences aged well for the next few or later years), same goes to just dances, but for the rest tho, pray that a random company pick them up..
The thing about Ubisoft is that they are primarily known for making single player games. Of course the live service model is not going to work out for them. They compared themselves to Activision and EA but those companies are fundamentally different to Ubisoft. They need to stop with the trend chasing.
Arlo. I like your channel. But please provide context at the start of your video for what specifically you are talking about. I’m 3 minutes in and have no idea why they are in trouble. Just a short headline would be enough then the detail (which I’m guessing is coming) to follow. Thank you.
This suddenly reminds me of a video you did a while back where you reference Jimquisition and how everything in gaming is so depressing, it's a madness.
how did we reach a point where its frowned upon for the general public to be allowed to purchase stock in a company? you really think the tech-aristocrats who own valve are less greedy than the public investors who invest in ubisoft? some of the public investors in ubisoft could literally be just normal people
@@GravitatisThere’s one thing you’re not considering here: how much money does the general public have? Even if every Joe Schmo had 1000 dollars in shares in Ubisoft, that still wouldn’t be half of what the richest investors would have, and it’s those richest investors who are actually given seats on board meetings with votes on how the company is run and all of that, not Joe Schmo. And yeah they are as greedy if not more than the people who would be in charge of a privately owned company. So I get why publicly traded sounds good, it sounds like democracy applied to companies and that’s great. What we’re actually seeing though is aristocracy
@@Excelsior1937 and so how is that worse than a private company like steam who completely prevents joe schmo from even attempting to invest his money in their company at all? ubisoft may be mostly owned by rich techno-aristocrats, but steam is _completely_ owned by rich techno-aristocrats
Companies going under private equity control is a major trend in many industries right now. There’s a lot of government regulation for public company regarding audit and agency problems that don’t exist for private companies.
>Ubisoft goes private >Starts listening to players instead of investors >Starts pumping out actually good games >Makes sequels to beloved IPs that been ignored on the search for infinite wealth (Splinter Cell, Rayman) >Becomes beloved and makes 1 ubisoftillion dollars >Money makes them become ambitious and fund new innovative IPs that break new grounds in the interactive medium >Meanwhile other game companies start to collapse in on themselves due to having to keep up with growing investor demands >Ubisoft's success inspires them and they go private too >Gaming is saved Please Ubisoft please I beg you
Nah best case scenario Ubisoft goes private Takes a few years to get back on track Make some great succes ome after another Make a Ubibillion dollars Get back on the market Everything goes back to where it was
I get the schadenfreude, but all that's going to happen is another greedy company swooping in to get all these juicy IPs, like Rayman, Prince of Persia, or Assassin's Creed. Things will not improve once Ubisoft is bought by Microsoft. Or EA. Or Epic Games. Yves Guillemot is going to get a Golden Parachute, people are going to lose their jobs, and you can bet your furry blue behind that their games will still be buggy and full of predatory microtransactions. Because whoever ends up buying Ubisoft is going to want to recoup their money ASAP.
If they are sold to EA, i kinda have higher hopes to see rayman game from their smaller studios like from coldwood (unravel) or by hazelight (it takes two) there are others as well who could make another great rayman game.
8:39 I know Valve is privately owned, idk about any others off the top of my head
Oh yeah, good catch!
Does Valve still make games? Don’t they only run steam and that’s all?
Deadlock
@@chasemarrison6272 valve just put a new game out in early access like, a month or so ago, yeah they still make games. and before that they released half life alyx in 2020, and on TOP of that they still update a lot of their games actively :P
Also I’m pretty sure square Enix is privately owned
I saw someone say something to the effect of "Triple A game companies breaking down is a sign that the industry is HEALING."
Edit: For clarification, I am not talking about Nintendo, people. Calm down. I'm talking about greedy corporations like Ubisoft. Which is the topic of the video.
I'll believe it when I see it. Although, Ubisoft going under would be a Christmas Miricle.
More a sign of changing times. All the same principles of ecology apply here. All the old apex predators are locked into a specialized method of survival, but as soon as the environment changes, that method no longer bears fruit. All the small adaptable generalists then rise up to dethrone them, eventually becoming apex predators themselves, and the cycle continues.
100%. Indies are the ones keeping the true spirit of video games alive, those teams are the size and budget of the ones who were making your DOOMs and Daggerfalls back in the day.
There are very few major game studios these days making games as I feel they should be. Off the top of my head, I can think of Atlus, Team Asobi, certain Nintendo studios…I’m sure there’s more but the fact that I can’t think of them is pretty grim.
Indie companies are corporatising at an alarming rate in the meanwhile.
Showing a game about sinking ships is really appropriate
what game is it
@@HutchIsOnYTassassins creed 4
While playing the pirate ship interior theme song from Wind Waker
I thought skull and bones was aaaa xd@Maxiz60
Seeing greed being properly punished just feels good, ok?
Comeuppance, for lack of a better term, is good.
Unfortunately this is not a common occurrence in the world. Usually something has to be greedy AND stupid in order to collapse
i wish it was proper punishment. likely, the execs actually responsible will get exorbitant exit payments and a large chunk of the devs who worked their butts off to implement those stupid ideas will get unceremoniously fired.
Can you feel ze schadenfreude?
As Dipper said, "Revenge is underrated"
Funny you posted this just now. My employer has an office in Paris and I have developers on my team who are based there. Which is where I am, right now, catching up with them. One of those developers, I hired away from Ubisoft (Star Wars was actually the last thing he touched before he left). And tonight over dinner he gave us his inside perspective on this very topic. What he described is very concerning, because in fact he does not think it is Yves Guillemot who is the problem, or at least, not intentionally. He described Yves as someone who comes around daily, chatting with developers, getting their perspectives, and showing real concern and passion for making and playing games. This sounds good, but it is in fact BAD, because it means that instead something has gone wrong, which he is no longer in control of. The ship has lost its rudder, causing the captain to appear to be a demented madman, running around smashing into things, when in reality he’s just a poor old man panicking and trying to figure out why his ship doesn’t go where he wants anymore.
The real problem, according to him, is a cancer that crept in from the marketing department. A number of people who were just pure marketing and spreadsheet driven who don’t know games, who saw an opportunity to bully their way up the ladder, and have now become a widespread infection across all of the upper management beneath Guillemot. He thinks even if Guillemot tried to take action now it is too late, because the cancer has spread so deeply that it would be hard to even know who to fire, and you would definitely miss some of them, and probably fire good people by mistake as well.
He described some pretty ugly experiences with these people. They are not gamers. They have no love for games or any sense of what makes them fun. Many of them, despite starting out in non-production roles like marketing or accounting, have successfully bullied their way up into positions of production decision making. They are invading the development teams constantly with demands for formulaic “it worked before, put it everywhere” features. I wish it was a joke. He said that line producers (people who are supposed to float between games and give constructive feedback or a little bit of perspective on market trends, etc. to help identify tweaks to a game direction) have essentially become a roving band of game vandals, who show up, see a prototype of something new and unique, and insist that it be shoved full of open world towers, brainless side quests, and micro-transactions. He did not think even going private will fix it. He thinks the company is so widely infected with this that there is no longer any way to sort out the good from the bad, and it’s just going to continue to get worse. Guillemot is essentially just a figurehead now, and the inmates are running the asylum. Probably the only fix is for the company to crash and burn, so that it’s no longer of interest to the people who were only in it for a way to climb the ladder, and then just to hope that the people left behind can rescue something from the ashes.
Marketers and people from accounting are also to blame for why cinema and tv shows are also declining in quality on average. The problem is we have given our whole society over to the bean counting algorithm and the soulless people who consult and manage it.
That is actually a really sad story to hear. Damn. 😔
DEI
Wow, now I feel kinda bad for Guillemot.
@@c0mpu73rguy I wouldn't feel TOO bad he was still leading the company when it's employees were getting abused for years and basically did nothing about it until it became public
I wonder how much money they threw into an enormous sinkhole going all-in trying to chase NFT's. Remember that?
"you can own something unique" what? "A serial number on your helmet" ... great idea.
sqeeunix is STILL doing that
I hear rumors if was half what they had
Even wilder they threw them into the Ghost Recon game nobody bought at launch because it was broken as fuck and full of false marketing
Even funnier is that the NFTs hit just as the Devs turned the game around so it basically killed the small revival it had
Perfect example of why shareholders are a problem. Shareholders get excited about new technology and ask why it isn't in a product that has nothing to do with that new technology. Businesses then lie or try to pivot to keep the investor money. And then suddenly you have toasters quote unquote powered by AI
I'd like to wish the employees of Ubisoft prosperous careers under less abusive and repulsive employers.
What employees? They all prolly got fired already so they could give their 10 CEOs a bonus.
Too bad they can't become employee owned
@@duskyer Or replaced by AI
@@duskyer I'm well aware that a good number of them have probably been fired. Note the latter half of my statement in the previous comment. Did you think that meant exclusively under Ubisoft? Ubisoft is a repugnant organization and I truly wish the best for those who want to keep their jobs, might have been fired or are looking for jobs elsewhere. That is the thrust of what I said without subtlety.
What if these companies are hiring repulsive employees with repulsive views? Because that's what they've been doing.
Looks like Ubisoft needs to start getting comfortable with people not buying their games.
Have they tried giving up their daily lattes?
They need to stop eating all that avocado toast.
if only they had a mindless, rabid, cattle-like fanbase that automatically buys all their products, like star wars or pokemon both do
@@Gravitatis oh they did, except they alienated them with their toxic business practices.
They need to get comfortable not owning their company.
0:10 i like to just hear you speak your mind. Its nice to just talk games sometimes. I dont get to talk about game related stuff with people usually so this is kind of filling that void i have so please do keep posting
Yeah, just casually talkimg about whatevers happening right now its just fun, mayne you think back with a response!
Problem with the positivity with the private argument: Ubisoft is still being run by its founders. They've been the ones at the forefront of both the abuse and scummy business practices of the company. It just means that Ubisoft will be defacto run by the people who headed projects like skull and bones.
Imagine how angry they would be after losing all that money. I wouldn't want to work for them.
honestly my perception of ubisoft going private is to deal with debt and essentially try to get the french goverment or some investor to essentially save the company and go public again.
I believe a good example of going private and not benefiting/improving from it is Bungie after breaking free from Activision and before the Sony buyout. Because during that period they were private, they made decisions that would land them in the hot water that they've been in for the past year. It's not a matter of if its private or public, it's the leadership in charge who can influence their company weather its positive or negative
I'm dead serious when I say that finance is the rot at the heart of what is wrong with society. There isn't an ounce of /j in me
Aka: Money is the root of all evil.
@@hadessonjamesnot all evil, but certainly a lot of the evil we face. At the end of the day it's all about equity of power or lack thereof. Great power imbalance allows for domination and abuse which in our current system that's usually taking the form of money/capital
Who controls the money and invented the banking systems?
@@EmergencyChannel go away nazi
"There isn't an ounce of /j in me" is one of my favorite things I've ever read and I will be using that from now on
I was screaming at my screen at the end of the ship battle. SCREAMING!!
It was like a Shakespearean Tragedy!
Oh hey there Bread Pirate
If we're going to get anything better, we need to repeat:
Friends don't let friends play slop.
I can’t stop my friends from playing almost nothing but slop lol. Mostly Call of Duty and stuff of that nature. I’m at least trying to put them on to some fantastic games so they can see what else is out there.
Forcing people to play or not to play things isn't the answer. It ruins friendships over the most trivial of matters. However, you're not wrong. The more people continue to buy bad-faith products, the more it emboldens these corpos to continue milking people with bad-faith products. They get comfortable with pushing their trash because they know idiots will keep buying it. The only way to teach someone without an open mind is to let them fail. Let them continue to buy trash because they are trash. Only in mistakes does someone learn. My best friend used to be someone that would buy the sloppiest games of all time, and he disregarded a lot of my concerns in the beginning. After realizing I was right, he doesn't preorder anymore, he waits for reviews, he makes note of good studios, and he gets second opinions from me and other friends whom have our hands on the pulse of gaming. He feels a lot better about what he's playing these days, and the burnout he was starting to feel dissipated because he has faith in the studios he enjoys now.
I won't stop someone that loves buying mounts every week on WoW, or a helplessly toxic CoD player, because they're in the ecosystems they belong in. I don't want people like that in my communities causing problems. Fortunately they keep to their lanes well if not disturbed.
Remember when Ubisoft would publish weird Japanese games in the West so they would get international releases? I remember those days. I respected Ubisoft a lot then. So disappointing to see what they've become.
Well, that certainly explains why my copy if Breath of Fire had Ubisoft in its credits! I was always confused by that…
Petz Catz/Dogz 2 moment
Armored Core 4 For peak
Persona 4 in Australia!
They completely forgot that their games have to be fun for people to buy them
That happens to big corporations, except maybe Nintendo.
But the charts! The charts clearly say that consumers consume the exact same game over and over and over and over! There is no common sense, only charts!
@@Tyrany42 It works if each iteration of that same game is at least up to a bar of quality that will keep the majority of your player base satisfied (not wowed, just satisfied), but unfortunately Ubisoft is having issues even getting up to that bar.
@@DeeptunesterNah, Avatar and Star Wars Outlaws were about as competent as your average Ubisoft game, and they didn’t move that many copies. Skull and Bones was more disappointing after the mega delay and only ship combat so that makes sense. But I think people are tired of even the competent warmed over Ubisoft formula with whatever licensed IP slapped on it
thats not true at all
the best selling game this year was a college football 25, and its terrible and not fun in the slightest degree
If they sink, I'm glad we at the very least got another Mario + Rabbids game before those guys jumped ship. They clearly had a ton of passion for Sparks of Hope and it was a real shame that very high quality game didn't do well.
Honestly really hope those devs get brought in by Nintendo themselves. They’ve clearly proven themselves.
@@thephantomist7199 Their animation team alone is ridiculous, both Mario + Rabbids games are so fluid and joy-inducing to watch!
Tbh I played both mario + rabbids games and the first one was great but sparks of hopes just wasn't as good, the free-form movement quest system and a lot of minor changes just didn't click with me, I never finished it
@@shrezinpumking8038 The second is definitely a departure from the major tactical aspect I agree, but I think it has a lot of great strategy and ideas in its own right
And a lot of respect for Star Fox in StarLink, the dialog from the SF team felt so respectful and effort in looking into starfox lore as well
I agree, privatization does seem like a good idea, but I'd still be concerned about the jerk running the company. Even with it private, he could still run it into the ground which is sad. 😓
Yeah, but at least we won't 100% have jerks influencing decisions; the same can't be said for public companies
how about the people responsible being punished and having to work at Wendy's instead of receiving golden parachutes ? Responsibility and all that stuff rich people constantly get to tell the workers?
@@budderk1305say it louder for the people in the back!
@@budderk1305who gives a shit? Selfish arrogant activists don’t deserve anything.
@@budderk1305 What? I don't want them!
I don’t know how anyone has a backlog short enough to justify buying a new Ubisoft game
Yep, a Ubisoft game is like buying an empty hot dog bun to eat. It works in a pinch if there’s nothing in the pantry and you’re hungry late at night. That’s it
@@user-wb8iu1hl6i even with that analogy I’d still just cut my losses and go to bed with intent on maybe going out for a nice breakfast in the morning
Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity? Because Ubisoft sure doesn't know about it...
Arlo, Star Wars is imploding just as badly as Ubisoft. The IP is all but dead. The toys ain't selling. People are not flocking to Disney+ to watch the shows. You would think a theme hotel based off Star Wars would do very well. It did so poorly that it was shut down in less than 5 years.
Sad, considering I loved Bad Batch, Tales of the Jedi, and Andor. However, I think the Acolyte has finally proved Disney isn't worthy to continue the franchise. I'm not salty Lucas signed that paper (especially since Lucas Star Wars had issues itself), but the time to pass on torch (or even end the franchise) has come.
@@batmanbud2 All the animated shows were great. The live action stuff just kept going downhill after Season 02 of The Mandalorian. They kept doing 'bait & switch' with it. The Obi-wan show wasn't even about Obi-wan, it was about Leia & some inquisitor no one cares about. They kept misrepresenting the lore, pushing political messages, etc. This is all the stuff CW did with their DC shows & the viewership tanked, yet for some reason they just keep doing it.
It's gotten to a point where they don't even want to make a good show or movie anymore, they just want to keep pushing their politics & that's not entertainment. It's brainwashing & people know it.
@@Crazy_Gamer_OG yeah, I honestly agree with that.
I will stand by Andor until the day I die, though. I loved that all the way through.
@@Crazy_Gamer_OG Reuniting Grogu and Din so quickly was a bad decision, and in a different show no less. Imagine somebody 15 years from now binging the Mandalorian from the first time and after the big emotional goodbye at the end of season 2 and in the next episode Grogu is just there.
The Hotel was also marketed terribly and priced insanely. For a thorough deep dive i recommend people watch Jenny Nicholson video essay/ review as she was able to go to make a video on it before it closed and does a good job deep diving into the faults of the project from the get go!
This should be a wake up call to slow down on assassin creed and put some time into other franchises for a while, not just rayman since Ubisoft has a large catalog of ip’s
Actually they are doubling down on AC. There are reports that they are planning to release 10 AC games in just 5 years.
I heard in another video that they just announced they have 10 Assassin's Creed projects on the way. The corporate thing to do in this situation is not to take risks on old IP or develop new IP, it's to go down to the slop mines.
@@JustCallMeKnux the sad part is, I would totally believe you just because it's something Ubisoft would actually do.
Might and Magic: Olden Era is in the pipeline right now, and they greenlit Archon Games to create a warhammer-esque miniature line for the IP in the board gaming space.
@@Crazy_Gamer_OGThat's the smell of a French move, isn't it? 💀
By the looks of it the biggest privately owned game companies are Valve, Epic, IO Interactive, and from there it's all smaller companies like Supergiant. Even then some "privately owned" ones have a % from Tencent or otherwise.
If Tencent is involved in them, then they aren't private.
@@thedarkdragon89 Tencent has their grubby hands just about everywhere.
Interestingly, becoming a publicly traded company is what killed Maxis. They wound up having to have a board of directors that forced them to make like 6 different games in one year, and the team wasn't big enough to do this, so all the games either got canned or turned out to be really buggy and fell short of the creative vision. The worst game was Streets of SimCity, which had a great premise but was released in basically an unplayable state. Maxis then began to sink and Electronic Arts bought them
Lariat Studios is a private company.
Same with Valve, you know the owners of Steam.
The moment I realized Ubisoft isn’t for me anymore is when I downloaded the demo for prince of Persia the lost crown and I couldn’t even get past the title screen without the demo trying to get me to make a Ubisoft account for a demo bro 🤦♂️
I'm tired of having to make an account for anything these days, especially when you're asked to make a different account when you already used one to purchase the game in the first place. Now suddenly I need to make another just to play it.
Creating an account takes like 2 mins. Its annoying when you are asked to login even after buying it from somewhere else. There should be an option to carry the saves and achievements to uplay in the games settings. Make it optional, like connecting twitch to some games.
@@Finnishmanni Yeah and that's the main issue, every time you launch the game from Steam, you wait a bit for the secondary launcher to launch, you log into the launched launcher, then you wait for the game to be launched by the secondary launcher, _THEN_ you get to play. And that's assuming their servers aren't having issues, which is more common from apps like Ubisoft Connect and the Rockstar launcher. It isn't a huge deal but its just inconvenient enough to become grating after a while.
8:45 Mihoyo is privately owned and pretty much the reason why its able to pump out so much quality content
One thing: in my limited knowledge of the stock market, people do not care about the dividende anymore. No, the returns are just too smalls for them. They just want to sell the shares for more money to other people. They want the line to go up. That's why they want endless growth! Infinite money from infinite players! For that line to keep going up, and for people to get to sell the shares for money. That's (I think) the sentiment. No betting on the company's long term performance or get steady revenue. Just hoping the line goes up to sell.
The thing about employee treatment, I think, is best explained with the "magic table" scenario. Imagine you have a magic table that produces $10,000 of completely legal cash every day. Most of us would pay off our debts, help out friends, maybe get some nicer things, but eventually we'd probably wind up giving out cash to charity or something.
A billionaire would use that $10,000 to *try to find a second magic table*, and if you don't think like that you will never BE a billionaire. It's all about racking up the high score far beyond the point personal comfort or even power could possibly matter.
yeah being a privately owned company does sound like the best decision
The biggest issue is that you’ll have less money to work with.
Its 10x better than giving into shareholders who publicly declared that their mission is to "create profit above all else".
Problem is if they can survive the hurdle.
Love the celebration content for developers about to lose their jobs 🕺💃
@@psychokinrazalonyou dont understand what being a public company is if you are saying they will have less money
@@chiquita683currently they are relying on investor money that they can't rely on, and people are gonna lose jobs either way. while obviously nobody should lose their jobs imo the better option is to bite the bullet and go private, where they can manage their money better and less people have to lose their jobs in the future
It's damn near time one of these big time publishers goes under, the fact that they are being brought to their hands and knees is a sign that gaming is healing and that they'll have to produce actual entertainment, not shitty time wasters anymore.
People said that a decade ago when THQ went belly up and now THQ's assets are part of the Embracer Group, a far larger, far worse entity. Careful what you wish for.
@@pattersong6637embracer group is also going under (a lot of studios e.g gearbox got sold, coffee stain and tabletop division are footing the bill for ALL PREV PURCHASES basically)
@@pattersong6637 From what I can tell something similar may happen to Ubisoft, as Tencent Limited is looking to acquire Ubisoft.
@@pattersong6637who are Embracer Group?
Problem is once you're public going back into being privately owned is not easy. You'd basically need to buy back every single share any shareholder currently has (or at least a majority, and then you can force the rest to sell) and that's gonna be extremely expensive, especially for a failing company
15:01 "Usually a ship that big takes a lot to sink"
Background footage of the entire video: Trying to sink a really big ship
Well played, Arlo. Well played.
The sad thing is that instead of chasing trends, Ubisoft has a huge and diverse portfolio IP that they didn't need to put all of their eggs into a single live service basket. Without the need to chase after shareholders demanded trends, they could have comfortably cruise by with a new non-live service Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy, and Far Cry game every three year, so they'll have a big franchise game every year, while keeping one or two multiplayer and live service game running, and funding a few small projects as experiments and extra cash flow like the Rayman or Rabbids games.
They did do that. The problem is that they homogenized Far Cry and Assassins Creed into one and dropped Splinter Cell so their AAA output became a blob
They have so many IPs that they could release so many great hits, but they only remembered AC and farcry and rabbits.
Hey guys, I'm starting to think Ubisoft might be a sinking ship. What do you think?
Somebody should make a video about that...
Many companies thought that the covid numbers would stay, which is one of the many issues Ubisoft faces now. The games being all nearly the same is another.
I love the content on this channel. You're one of the only people on this platform that i trust when it comes to game/nintendo related news. I never expect any clickbait and all of your content is very interesting and entertaining to watch. Keep it up👍
he's the exact right balance of knowledgeable and likeable, and he's unafraid of sharing his own unfiltered opinions. pretty much my default nintendo youtuber at this point.
Sorry Arlo but i will not give Ubisoft this escuse , Nintendo is a publicly traded company,and they don't do what Ubisoft does,a lot of them are a publicly traded company, and they don't have this problem.
I blame the entirety of the leadership team on Ubisoft for they trouble.
No one is to blame other than Ubisoft.
Daily reminder to enjoy and support indie games! There’s a lot of cool stuff out there
“Oh, Ubisoft!”
[laugh track, applause, cheesy theme music]
@@Dudeman23rd?
@@Gestersmekbro doesn’t understand TV Cliches 😭💀
@@owenmeierits ok TV is a dying culture
@@Dudeman23rdEveryone knows it's Ubisoft!
Ubisoft reminds me of the dude in Hellraiser-
A hundred hooks in his skin, pulling him apart in different directions.
It didn’t end well for Frank either.
8:39 Larian, the devs behind Divinity and Baldur's Gate 3, are privately owned
Yep. Don't know how "big" they are in terms of employees and income. BG3 certainly raked in the dough, but it's also an outlier for them. They've just been consistently turning out solid games.
@@Xeno426 To be fair, private ownership also comes with a fair number of risks. It does let you create what you want to create, but it means you have fewer options for financial lifelines. And there's no guarantee a private studio won't also go insane.
I'm in huge favor of companies going private usually because investors make absurd demands, but with Ubisoft it wouldn't fix much as long as Yves Guillemot is CEO.
"I thought Star Wars would do well, just because the name is so big"
Yeah, you and Disney both.
Why is Ubisoft getting so mad that not owning their company? They expected the same from their customers
1:45 where do I apply man?
3:55 you can walk right up to a stormtrooper on the hardest difficulty, as he warns you to stop, and he WON'T shoot you. Outlaws WAS a gimme, but they just fucked it over THAT BAD.
Puppet Heads we eatin real good tonight 🙌🔥
Reason why Star Wars Outlaw isn't doing well isn't just an Ubisoft Dev problem, it's also a Disney management problem. Their both in the same sinking ship right now.
Publictly owned companies have their issues, but companies that go from public to private usually end up much worse. The reason is that they end up being bought using debt, and new owners use company's profits to pay back that debt rather than reinvest it to make the company better.
Maybe if they end up being bought by another big game company(instead of a financial firm) they may end up better, but the few ones that could buy them are public so that wouldn't count as going private.
Companies have to understand that a live service competes with any other live service, even if they're different genres. They compete for player population, but it's just an oversaturated market. People interested in your live service are already playing a different one.
Streaming companies didnt get that memo, they all wanted their own streaming platform and theyre all struggling now
I just binge-watched Pirates of the Caribbean, and there's a quote from Jack Sparrow to Barbossa that reminds me of what Ubisoft has become. Barbossa: " The world used to be bigger." Jack replied: "The world is the same, there's just less in it." Ubisoft used to pump out games like Splinter Cell, Assassin Creed, and Far Cry; it just now says they got lazy with them.
roses are red
violets are blue
so is arlo
and he is marvelo
us
15:49 damn finally sunk the boat only to immediately crash into a reef and sink yourself, pure poetry
0:36 Hey Arlo, listen. Is talking about this stuff petty? Maybe. But do I greatly enjoy listening to you talking about this stuff? Yes, absolutely. So don’t worry about it 😊
I don't think anyone of us care about how petty something might be when these big companies are so stupid they do this all to themselves
If it really were petty, he wouldn't bother making a video about it, now would he?
In my country, there is this chain of gaming stores where you can also trade in games with them for cash and there I noticed Ubisoft's decline too. They lowered the prices of Ubisoft games and barely give any cash for them anymore. For example: They offer 30 bucks for a used copy of Tears of the Kingdom, but Prince of Persia or Mario + Rabbids is just 8.
And honestly nothing of value was lost. Lemme know when some worthwhile studio picks up the Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil IP.
Same here bro.
Been waiting on my rayman remastered triology for a while now 😕
And then it’s Microsoft and then we never see Rayman ever again to go rot in the Xbox platformer dungeon with Banjo, Conker, Crash, and Spyro.
We kept warning them, again and again and again, and here we are...
For Star Wars outlaws ironically I think that had far more to do with Disney then Ubisoft. It wasn’t great but is wasn’t awful ither it was just mid, but a mid star wars game, especially a signal player one sense we haven’t had one in a bit, should have sold well. But Disney has managed to poison the biggest media franchise in the world so badly that nobody wants anything to do with the ip these days, especially on the already toxic Ubisoft.
I love how all of these videos eventually evolve into an anti-investor rant and I am here for it
the entire industry in general needs to go back to smaller games... If one game/project can screw over your company, it's not a good project. Doesn't need to be indie developer small, but. y'know. Don't be the farm on one game. The general population doesn't need 8k games and ultrarealistic graphics. Just give us some fun cartoony stylized stuff, that won't cost a billion dollars to develop.
8:35 The largest private gaming company is undoubtedly Valve but I understand if you sort of put them in a separate category. But still, compare Valve's decisions to the Big 3 and I do think you see a difference between publicly traded tomfoolery vs. privately owned enterprise. I'd never claim it's some kind of panacea for a company's worst capitalist tendencies, but I do believe it helps keep a company focused on the proper set of incentives.
Nintendo famously, despite being publicly traded, acts more similar to a old-fashioned private enterprise through sheer force of brand, will and reputation -- their reward is a load of conflict with shareholders. I remember reading interviews about their shareholders giving them grief over their decision to raise employee wages 10% to help counteract inflation.
To answer your question about the largest game publisher/developer/studio: The answer, by a mile, is Valve which, even with conservative estimates, is worth 2-4x what Ubisoft is and has an unprecedentedly high cost to revenue ratio that I'm not sure any other publisher could even pretend to approach.
This is why we need universal basic income.
If people aren't afraid that their family will be homeless if they lose their jobs, employers might have to think twice before they abuse their staff so hard that the company falls apart
Butternut squash, yes please!
LOVE your explanation of the stock markets and publicly traded companies.
3:40 Ubisoft (and Disney for that matter) seemed to have forgotten that if you put out a product PEOPLE HAVE TO WANT IT! Star Wars Outlaws selling (estimated) in selling just over a million copies means very little. The previous Star Wars games being SW Jedi: Series and SW Battlefront sold absolute LAPS around SW Outlaws and they had their own issues surrounding their launches.
4:15 this is definitely part of the problem. I used to pray for my games to be massive 100+ hour open world adventures. However, those have become so exhausting over time. I much prefer 10-20 hour games I can play in 1-2 weeks like Astro Bot or small experiences I can play over a rainy weekend like Unpacking, Toem, Abzu, Lego Builder’s Journey etc.
that the video is of sinking ships is not lost on me. great subtext 😆
So the thing about the profit incentive of a public company is that "in theory", the thing which is best for their customers, or at least something "pretty good", should be the most profitable for the company, at least in the long term. But the problem is that there is typically no incentive to maximize the long-term profitability; most investors want growth right now, and most CEO's don't last that long and get bonuses based on increased share price. So if they can get the share price to inflate a lot 'right now', collect their bonus, and then take a generous exit-package when things start getting bad and they want a new CEO, they'll do just that. I'm not sure what the solution to that is other than some massive restructuring of the economy and corporate law.
Some companies do value long term growth though, it's really all down to whether the shareholders trust that long term growth is being achieved and if they trust the company enough to stick it out that long.
10:00 Publicly traded companies borrow against their stock. It's a massive source of capital for them.
so what? they still have to pay back the money eventually. if the price of their stock falls before they pay the loan back, they are in deep trouble and have basically bankrupted their company
God I'd love to know how much of this is people not wanting to support monsters, vs how much people just aren't interested in buying these games
the latter is very likely the cause, just like concord normal people just don't care, most people don't know about any of the controversy, they just see the pattern in their quality and just buy a better game instead
Add in the third camp of people not knowing Ubisoft makes more than Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is awesome, but it was hard to gauge how many people knew about the game if they weren't already following people in love with Metroidvanias.
Gee I wonder how they get themselves in this situations
Im really happy you started topic arlo😊
it's strange to say I'm looking forward to the AAA bubble finally bursting, but the industry has just been due for a reckoning.
They’re going for a buy out that even had ideas for a theme park that will never happen
All corporations are kinda evil, but some are definitely worse.
ubisoft is doing the equivalent of realizing their ship has sprung a leak, and then deciding itd be a good idea to pull out planks of wood from the hull to patch it up
Completely deserved
This video is a perfect backdrop for this topic. I seriously thought it was skull and bones and only after a while I recognized this was Black Flag. And that's an 800 million dollar problem
I blame Ubisoft's downfall on Assassin's Creed. They realized they could make mediocre games that sell well as long as it had a bunch of meaningless content and decided all their games should be like that.
they were correct though
the reason ubisoft is failing isnt because they realized they could just create mediocre games forever. companies have already known this fact for years, they arent stupid
The idea of Guillermot becoming a less bad person is the least realistic thing in this video lmao
Ubisoft was nice while it lasted... Rayman, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, Starlink: Battle for Atlas... Rabbids, I guess...
Nah, im pretty sure Rayman and the Rabbids would be fine if they aren't forgotten, I'm sure some employees at Nintendo do see some potential for them after the success of the Mario + Rabbids games (hopefully theses sentences aged well for the next few or later years), same goes to just dances, but for the rest tho, pray that a random company pick them up..
they were mid. even their best games are not even 9/10's.
Which games though?
Man i love these videos
The thing about Ubisoft is that they are primarily known for making single player games. Of course the live service model is not going to work out for them. They compared themselves to Activision and EA but those companies are fundamentally different to Ubisoft. They need to stop with the trend chasing.
I wish game companies would just make good games
Arlo. I like your channel. But please provide context at the start of your video for what specifically you are talking about. I’m 3 minutes in and have no idea why they are in trouble. Just a short headline would be enough then the detail (which I’m guessing is coming) to follow. Thank you.
This suddenly reminds me of a video you did a while back where you reference Jimquisition and how everything in gaming is so depressing, it's a madness.
nothing petty wishing for the downfall of the bourgeoisie
IO interactive became independent in 2017. But I’m not sure how big they are anymore.
Valve is privately owned
how did we reach a point where its frowned upon for the general public to be allowed to purchase stock in a company?
you really think the tech-aristocrats who own valve are less greedy than the public investors who invest in ubisoft? some of the public investors in ubisoft could literally be just normal people
@@GravitatisThere’s one thing you’re not considering here: how much money does the general public have? Even if every Joe Schmo had 1000 dollars in shares in Ubisoft, that still wouldn’t be half of what the richest investors would have, and it’s those richest investors who are actually given seats on board meetings with votes on how the company is run and all of that, not Joe Schmo. And yeah they are as greedy if not more than the people who would be in charge of a privately owned company. So I get why publicly traded sounds good, it sounds like democracy applied to companies and that’s great. What we’re actually seeing though is aristocracy
@@Excelsior1937
and so how is that worse than a private company like steam who completely prevents joe schmo from even attempting to invest his money in their company at all?
ubisoft may be mostly owned by rich techno-aristocrats, but steam is _completely_ owned by rich techno-aristocrats
@@Gravitatiswhy did you get so mad about an objective statement? You replied to a four word comment with two paragraphs, calm tf down
@@Batmagoo
im not mad, and those were just sentences, they werent paragraphs
Companies going under private equity control is a major trend in many industries right now. There’s a lot of government regulation for public company regarding audit and agency problems that don’t exist for private companies.
>Ubisoft goes private
>Starts listening to players instead of investors
>Starts pumping out actually good games
>Makes sequels to beloved IPs that been ignored on the search for infinite wealth (Splinter Cell, Rayman)
>Becomes beloved and makes 1 ubisoftillion dollars
>Money makes them become ambitious and fund new innovative IPs that break new grounds in the interactive medium
>Meanwhile other game companies start to collapse in on themselves due to having to keep up with growing investor demands
>Ubisoft's success inspires them and they go private too
>Gaming is saved
Please Ubisoft please I beg you
Nah best case scenario
Ubisoft goes private
Takes a few years to get back on track
Make some great succes ome after another
Make a Ubibillion dollars
Get back on the market
Everything goes back to where it was
“Money makes them become ambitious”
See, that’s the problem.
>you wake up and cry
What happens instead would be money makes them cocky again and the cycle continues.
From a distance the channel logo kinda looks like Freeza's head.
This was posted 47 seconds ago how did y’all comment on Sunday
Are you time travellers
Patreon
Finally someone is talking about this! Game companies, and many others, need to go private again, to not kill themselves.
OH NO!
Anyway...
Ah! You beat me to it!
In an alternative universe Arlo, you became an economist.
Arlo’s anticapitalist arc is in full swing and I’m here for it!
Fr
Thanks for showing us gameplay of Black Flag to remind us of how great the games this company made used to be.
I get the schadenfreude, but all that's going to happen is another greedy company swooping in to get all these juicy IPs, like Rayman, Prince of Persia, or Assassin's Creed. Things will not improve once Ubisoft is bought by Microsoft. Or EA. Or Epic Games. Yves Guillemot is going to get a Golden Parachute, people are going to lose their jobs, and you can bet your furry blue behind that their games will still be buggy and full of predatory microtransactions. Because whoever ends up buying Ubisoft is going to want to recoup their money ASAP.
If they are sold to EA, i kinda have higher hopes to see rayman game from their smaller studios like from coldwood (unravel) or by hazelight (it takes two) there are others as well who could make another great rayman game.