UBIsoft in potential financial trouble

Karamazov said:
Aren't ass creed games about people from the future entering memories of dead ancestors and being like in the matrix ?
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see colon said:
Besides the fact that the reality contains both science fiction and fantasy elements, it is 100% an interpretation. Memories are at their core, an interpretation of reality. If the technology existed that could simulate out memories, those memories would have to be further interpreted by the machine, and would be played back and reinterpreted by the user re-experiencing those memories. Perception is limited by our ability to interpret the stimulation.

An easy way to think of it is 2 people with different spice tolerances eating a medium spice dish. One might hardly feel the spice, while the other might find it unbearable. The ground truth is that it's medium, but the individual interpretations would be mild and spicy.
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None of the other, older titles were like this.
 
Cappuccino said:
None of the other, older titles were like this.
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Real life is like this. What we experience, and by extension of that, our memories, are not the ground truth of reality. They are an interpretation of reality. In fact, there is plenty of research that suggests that our memories are extremely malleable, and constantly being reinterpreted by ourselves. Any simulation of our memories would have to be an interpretation at best. And down right fantasy at worst. Which perfectly explains why you fight a minotaur and Thomas Jefferson having bear strength in these games.

Also, there are plenty of times in the older titles where the player character knows they are in the future. They have conversations with the people in the Animus. So even if they are reliving the memories of someone else, they would still be interpreting those memories through themselves.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Ubi's money comes from making and selling products. What good is investors wanting certain types of products if those products fail in the market place? Heck, what use is it to those investors even?!
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A lot of the computer age shareholder companies are driven by shareholder value/investments than their actual income stream. They always promise "the future" like Twitter(before takeover) or Netflix. They were only bleeding money with no profit in sight...

UBI is dependent on investments and if Blackrock wants to punish a company's shareholder value they can do that easily if they don't follow the agenda. They control global markets...

Just look what Disney did with Star Wars they paid 4B for. They destroyed it *intentionally*.

It wasn't rational by conventional business logic.

That should tell you that for some groups money is just a social/control tool and not just used to make more. Then you see the hand of the state/central-banks and the real global power players at work.
 
This is getting too RSPC OT. There certainly isn't a need to determine historical gender types in Japan if the game is actually selling well, as Ubi's financials clearly aren't be affected whether there was or wasn't. IF Shadows bombs, and there's fair evidence it was due to the gender aspects of the story, quite possibly, maybe, at a push, the outrage of historical inaccuracy can be considered. ;)
 
tuna said:
You can start reading up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_minorities_in_Japan

Even when I lived there in the early 2000s there was a lot of newhalf porn etc. There were also things like cross dressing host and hostess clubs and similar. I never saw one in real life though.
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This artical has a tag in the header saying it’s poorly written (and I agree, its structure is unlike any other wiki article I’ve read) and also doesn’t prove the existence of ‘non binaries’ in feudal Japan. You going there and seeing perverts in 2001 is irrelevant.

Shifty Geezer said:
There certainly isn't a need to determine historical gender types in Japan if the game is actually selling well, as Ubi's financials clearly aren't be affected whether there was or wasn't.
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i think it will sell well regardless of the gender nonsense because it’s ultimately not a major part of the game. That said it won’t sell well enough to pull Ubisoft out of the hole imo, and this is partially due to it looking like just an iteration on the post-Origins template. I would like an AC game that returns to form, like a successor to AC Brotherhood/Revelations than Origins/Odyssey.
 
As an uncertain reference point, Shadows hit 60k peak Steam users. First page English language negative reviews seems mostly about technical faults, DRM, voice acting quality, and generally being a dull game to play in their opinions. 83% positive on Steam. 8.1 Metacritic. 4.1 PC User Metacritic with a lot of remarks on Japanese history.
 
tuna said:
So you are claiming that there are no historical or cultural examples of gender fluidity or even gayness in Japan?
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Even if there was, is that what you buy video games for? To find examples of gender fluidity?

Because I can tell you without a doubt that I do NOT buy games for social lectures. I do NOT buy games that try to tell me how to think or how to act. I would not buy a game that lectures to the gamer about gender fluidity any more than I would buy a game that lectures about the benefits of racism.

And oh yes, there are racists in Japan too. Should we make a game showing off how good those people are, painting them in a good light, lecturing you on how you should listen to them? Would that be your idea of entertainment?

Sure wouldn't be mine. But in the name of fairness and equality, if you're going to have one shouldn't you have the other?
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Surely that's played out in the gameplay, not the story? Given a game that really embodies the spirit of ninja and allows players to enjoy that fantasy, would they reject that game because the cutscenes suck? I know I wouldn't. Heck, I can't be arsed with any story in any game and I'm skip, skip, skip! It's alien to me how someone would reject a good game they'll enjoy playing because of a bad narrative. Only particular reason I can think to skip a game is if there's grating background NPC chatter that can't be avoided.

Going by Steam numbers, it's selling far better than previous iterations, so the very opposite of being gradually ruined; Shadows is restoring the game.

Not at all controversial. The issue is who they were picking as their target audience. If we a take a theoretical example, let's imagine an AC set in the historic south of the US with an aspect of slavery and black oppression, released in a hypothetical world that's fundamentally neutral and won't generate any good or bad publicity based on the story choice. There is an element of society that'd want to play as a Redneck slaying Negroes, and an element that'd want to play to protect them. Ubi's choice of story would have to pick one side or the other as they can't serve both, and doing so would alienate the opposite side. For maximum business sense, they would need to pick the story that would have the largest favourable audience, and the other audience would complain about the game.

The people who are complaining about AC:Shadows would prefer a different story, but that doesn't inherently mean Ubi's choice is the wrong story. It's only clearly wrong in business terms if it utterly alienates most players, as I dare say AC:KKK would. Prior to release, internet noise would have some believe that the game would indeed be rejected for its story choices, but so far that's not playing out as clearly so.

* Apologies for the term 'Redneck'. It's the only name I can think of for the archetypal white racists of that ilk that'd attack people based on their skin colour, but I appreciate it's not a neutral term for a different culture.
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I think there´s a difference if the story/writing is not very good but works as an excuse to live out your power fantasy, or if the writing is bad in the sense that you actually dislike it for whatever reason. I felt that way about Spiderman 2. Amazing game in most aspects, but the writing and many of the characters are so freaking bad and anoying I dont know if I want to play it again.

I dont know how much these games generally sell, but hadnt the amount of players on steam dropped quite a bit?

Since you dont know how it would have sold if they had made less controversial choices you cant say they made the right choices. AC is i big franchise, ninjas are cool. Its not weird if it sells. Do you think the people who were put off by these choices and decided not to buy the game are fewer than the people who bought the game because of these choices who wouldnt have bought it otherwise?
 
ZebMacahan said:
I dont know how much these games generally sell, but hadnt the amount of players on steam dropped quite a bit?
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Dropped from what? Shadows is presently the highest peak concurrent player count of any AC game on Steam, hitting 65k over the weekend.
ZebMacahan said:
Since you dont know how it would have sold if they had made less controversial choices you cant say they made the right choices. AC is i big franchise, ninjas are cool. Its not weird if it sells. Do you think the people who were put off by these choices and decided not to buy the game are fewer than the people who bought the game because of these choices who wouldnt have bought it otherwise?
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No. However, if you are wanting to make a political or social point, you might be willing to sacrifice some sales for that. If that point loses you all the sales and ends your business, it's probably a bad choice unless you REALLY believe in the cause and the cost. However, if the number of people turned off is 0.01%, that's a far easier cost/benefit consideration. It might also be beneficial as where you have people who wouldn't buy the game for the story, the exposure might be positive PR and you might get some people slightly more included to buy to stick it to those would have everyone boycott.

In short, we can't understand the numbers or make any predictions. We can only go by observation of title sales relative to controversy. If there's no clear correlation between internet noise and poor sales, the argument "go woke, go broke" is nullified and it's not a significant business concern. That then points to other issues being the root cause of Ubi's financial troubles, such as quality of execution rather than type of content. The negative Steam reviews for Shadows focus on DRM, MTs, and poor acting, for example. Less of that would mean more positive reviews, maybe more sales.
 
Completelu Average said:
Because I can tell you without a doubt that I do NOT buy games for social lectures. I do NOT buy games that try to tell me how to think or how to act. I would not buy a game that lectures to the gamer about gender fluidity any more than I would buy a game that lectures about the benefits of racism.
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Racism and gender fluidity is not really the same. One is how you perceive a specific group of people, one is how you perceive yourself.

IME the best kind of media usually has something the that the author(s) want to say, or using Japanese, 伝える。Something like Attack on Titan really makes you think about the messages in the work and what the author emphasizes.
 
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