UBIsoft in potential financial trouble

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Ubisoft shutting studios, laying off 277 employees as it pulls plug on live-service shooter XDefiant

A month and a half after denying reports it was poised to pull the plug on its free-to-play live-service shooter XDefia…
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A month and a half after denying reports it was poised to pull the plug on its free-to-play live-service shooter XDefiant - which launched back in May - Ubisoft has confirmed it's doing just that, resulting in the closure of three production studios and 277 employees losing their jobs.
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Cyan said:
Ubisoft delays Assassin's Creed Shadows again because of a potential company sale, from Tencent?
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To Tencent perhaps? Tencent is only currently a minority shareholder, they don't own Ubisoft.
 
Malo said:
Isn't it a French company?
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If they have studios on US soil (and they have several) you have to satisfy regulatory body in US as well (probably the same goes for Canada and any other subsidiary). Typically when Chinese company buys multinational and US lawmakers aren't happy, subsidiaries inside United States are sold to third party or C-level are "very sad" to fire everyone working in US.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
What crash? What will be gained from it?
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The video game industry crash. After 40 years of growth, it is so mismanaged to stagnate during covid (how!?) and finally losses last year. After the first layoff spree in 2022. There are no new revenue streams and big publishers are overinvested due to projected growth. It does not mean there will be some hard crash, but I expect it because of how clueless the big publishers are. Instead of just making all kinds of games better, the suits just chase the biggest trends and try to conquer them by showering money at it. We are past the point where the publishers often don't know how to do again the hits of the past, they can only make worse versions. And the gold cows are now milked dry.

It doesn't have to be a crash, maybe just a significant correction. And none of this applies to insulated markets like China.

If the publishers fail enough to shake off the management that is only after numbers which are not sustainable, we can gain reasonably scaled projects of larger variety satisfying more people. That makes the crash desirable.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
What crash? What will be gained from it?
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Well, hopefully, eventually, game developers will remember who they are and what their job is.

Games are entertainment. Game developers are part of the entertainment industry. There are two very simple rules EVERYONE in the entertainment industry must follow to be successful. Those that follow these two rules extremely well always end up extremely successful, and those that ignore the two rules always fail. Those two rules are actually very simple:

#1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. If you're in the entertainment industry and you're making movies/music/books/TV shows/social media content/VIDEO GAMES, you need to be very aware of precisely who your target audience is, what they like, what they dislike, what will draw them in and what will turn them away.

#2. GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT. This should be self explanatory. Don't try to ram Live Services, pay subscriptions, the development fad of the moment, or socio-political agendas or lessons down the throats of your audience. Give the people the ENTERTAINMENT they want to play and do NOT try to force features and content which players don't want on them.


The problem with many game developers, and Ubisoft is a biggie here, is they have their own internal blueprint of what they want to do, and they expect and demand that everyone like it, accept it and buy it. It's the exact opposite of how the entertainment industry works. When you're telling your audience that they need to get used to not owning the games they buy from you, you need to get used to people not buying your games. After all, you're supposed to know them, and give them what they want. If you're telling them things like that, if you're trying to lecture your audience and potential customers, if you're saying things like "If you don't like it then don't buy it" you're clearly failing to follow your two rules for creating ENTERTAINMENT. Also, if you know your audience and are giving them what they want then you should NEVER have to defend design choices or make months worth of excuses to justify your racial insensitivity and racial/religious/cultural insults to your audience.

Developers that have to make multiple apologies, excuses, and defenses of their games before said game even releases are developers who deserve to fail. They don't belong in the entertainment industry because they are not following the two basic rules of producing entertainment. Employees of developers who contribute to the problems listed above should find themselves a different industry to work in as they are clearly not interested in entertaining others.


Know your audience and give them what they want = Making games that people want to play.

If a game developer isn't doing that, then what are they doing?
 
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Completelu Average said:
#2. GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT
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I agree with your general point but we can't have game developers always giving the people what they want. "The people" mostly don't know what they want and let's be honest, a large percentage just blindly consume whatever is laid before them. More importantly, ff we only get games that reflect what people think they want we will never discover new experiences.
 
Completelu Average said:
#2. GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT. This should be self explanatory. Don't try to ram Live Services, pay subscriptions, the development fad of the moment, or socio-political agendas or lessons down the throats of your audience
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This is very much political which is OT for this board. Focussing on the on-topic part, the arts have always had a hand in social agendas. Dickens, for example, was entirely about bringing to attention the plight of the everyman. Arts and entertainments, going back to the oldest traditions of story telling, have been used to bring a message to people who otherwise wouldn't hear that message because it's wrapped in a palatable package. So on this point you are very much mistaken save the degree of 'agenda' being presented. So long as a sociopolitical theme is handled well, it needn't cause a game (or other entertainment) to suffer sales.

I guess, where you say, "give them what they want," truth is consumers don't know what they want until presented with it. It's this unpredictability of the masses that makes fads unpredictable and unreproducable. There is no basic formula to determine and provide what will be popular, and many of the biggest successes take the world by surprise (leading to rapid bandwagoning!).
 
trinibwoy said:
I agree with your general point but we can't have game developers always giving the people what they want. "The people" mostly don't know what they want and let's be honest, a large percentage just blindly consume whatever is laid before them. More importantly, ff we only get games that reflect what people think they want we will never discover new experiences.
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Not true at all.

You are suggesting that people don't want new game experiences. What are you basing this belief on? Have you asked any gamers if they want new game experiences?


There is a difference between a "new game experience" and, for example, finding one obscure reference in one Japanese text about one black person, and then making an entire game based around the FALSE claim that this person was a Samurai, and then going out of your way to insult every Japanese cultural tradition that you can find in an attempt to rewrite history and force your socio-political ideas on them. There is a difference between a NEW GAME EXPERIENCE and forced Live Services in single player game franchises.

And if you think people don't know what they want, then what on earth makes you think some random developer does? If your statement is true then the developer doesn't know what they want, nor do they know what the gamer wants, and they just make games in a vaccum with no outside influence or context.

ECHO CHAMBER DEVELOPMENT

That is bad. And is why many games today are failing. They're made in an echo chamber where everyone on the development team isn't making any effort at all into making a game that gamers want and instead are doing their own thing for their own reasons, and then not understanding why nobody is buying it.

Insert Dragon Age: Veilguard reference here.
 
Completelu Average said:
You are suggesting that people don't want new game experiences.
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I didn't suggest that at all. What I said is that developers can't only cater to what people think they want because people in general don't know what they want.

Completelu Average said:
There is a difference between a "new game experience" and, for example, finding one obscure reference in one Japanese text about one black person, and then making an entire game based around the FALSE claim that this person was a Samurai, and then going out of your way to insult every Japanese cultural tradition that you can find in an attempt to rewrite history and force your socio-political ideas on them. There is a difference between a NEW GAME EXPERIENCE and forced Live Services in single player game franchises.
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Oh I see where you're coming from. Wrong forum for that.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
This is very much political which is OT for this board. Focussing on the on-topic part, the arts have always had a hand in social agendas. Dickens, for example, was entirely about bringing to attention the plight of the everyman. Arts and entertainments, going back to the oldest traditions of story telling, have been used to bring a message to people who otherwise wouldn't hear that message because it's wrapped in a palatable package. So on this point you are very much mistaken save the degree of 'agenda' being presented. So long as a sociopolitical theme is handled well, it needn't cause a game (or other entertainment) to suffer sales.

I guess, where you say, "give them what they want," truth is consumers don't know what they want until presented with it. It's this unpredictability of the masses that makes fads unpredictable and unreproducable. There is no basic formula to determine and provide what will be popular, and many of the biggest successes take the world by surprise (leading to rapid bandwagoning!).
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Sorry for being OT, but it is the only way to answer the question you asked.

And the fallacy of your argument is you act like everyone exists in a vacuum and nobody has any idea about anything. Your argument is making the assumption that all people are stupid, can't think for themselves, and have no idea what they like until you come along and tell them.

Which is totally false.

Let me make an example:

Why don't we make a game where the whole point is about killing members of a single benevolent and good race and stealing their wealth for no reason other than our own personal gain, and you get bonus points for doing horrible things like slapping children, killing pets in front of their owners, and killing old people in especially violent ways, all while death metal is blaring in the background and also include a high pitch squeal that never stops?

May be the best selling game in history, right? Everyone will surely love it. No reason at all to believe people wouldn't, because people don't know what they want, and therefore don't know what they don't want and don't like either, right?

Maybe everyone isn't really as stupid and clueless as you think, and have a very good idea of what they like and don't like.


Let me ask you this. How many people do you know that like being lectured to and told what to think by someone else while playing video games? Would you say it's the majority? Give me a percent. What percent of the people you know want to go out and spend $70 of their own money on a game that lectures them and tells them what to think on social issues?

That is the percent of your gaming market that might be interested in a game that lectures to their audience. Is it enough to be a big hit?

See, it's really not as hard as you claim, is it?
 
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