UBIsoft in potential financial trouble

I wonder if games would be more profitable if the the project management was better, if it even is possible to be better.
I don't think it is. There are studios that are extremely experienced like Naughty Dog, who still find themselves wrestling with costs and deadlines. Software is just too stupidly complex to manage deterministically.

From where I stand, a movie is also complex, we agree not as complex as a game. But relative to each other are movies closer to a perfect production cycle than a game. Of course movies have been around for over 100 years, so they do have some head start :)
In the case of movies, when a problem arises, throwing a bit more money or negotiating can tend to provide an immediate fix. eg. You've booked a helicopter but it's unavailable, you book another. Actor goes down ill, you shoot something around their role, or use a double. Problems in the physical space have generally obvious direct solutions (even if it requires a producer to run around like a crazy person!).

In the digital space, stuff stops working and you don't know why. There's then an investigation to find the problem before you can fix it. I've spent a day or two finding a problem that's fixed with a 30 second line change.

It's also worth noting that movies are crap at budgeting. They waste soooo much money. They'll book 100 extras for a day and end up not shooting them. They'll shoot useless footage and then cut it into a movie. Movies are very far from efficiently created. ;) I'm pretty sure games are managed far better than movies, but they also far more complex to piece together that to date, no-one, even those with decades of management experience, has managed to create a management strategy that delivers on time and on budget every time.
 
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I don't think it is. There are studios that are extremely experienced like Naughty Dog, who still find themselves wrestling with costs and deadlines. Software is just too stupidly complex to manage deterministically.


In the case of movies, when a problem arises, throwing a bit more money or negotiating can tend to provide an immediate fix. eg. You've booked a helicopter but it's unavailable, you book another. Actor goes down ill, you shoot something around their role, or use a double. Problems in the physical space have generally obvious direct solutions.

In the digital space, stuff stops working and you don't know why. There's then an investigation to find the problem before you can fix it. I've spent a day or two finding a problem that's fixed with a 30 second line change.

It's also worth noting that movies are crap at budgeting. They waste soooo much money. They'll book 100 extras for a day and end up not shooting them. They'll shoot unless footage and then cut it into a movie. Movies are very far from efficiently created. ;) I'm pretty sure games are managed far better than movies, but they also far more complex to piece together that to date, no-one, even those with decades of management experience, has managed to create a management strategy that delivers on time and on budget every time.

More important than good management (still very important) is rigorous and good code discipline and documentation. It makes it significantly easier to track down bugs. However, even with that there will still potentially be infuriating bugs that will pop up in a project and tracking it down can still potentially take a long and unpredictable amount of time.

Of course, when you have multiple people all working on different modules they all need to exercise rigorous code discipline or things will still fall apart.

It also doesn't help that you have a trade off in execution speed between extremely fast but extremely dangerous programming languages like C++ and relatively safe but slow programming languages like Java. Safe/dangerous being relative and referring to how much the language prevents a programmer from doing things they probably shouldn't be doing, but at the same time those limitations also prevent a programmer from making faster and more efficient code.

So games generally require fast execution which means using languages without as many guardrails that rely on the programmers knowing what they are doing and following their own best practices to avoid getting into trouble.

Sometimes I enjoy bug hunting and fixing (when the bug can be logically and systematically found), sometimes I hate it (when you sort of have to get lucky to find it because it's happening somewhere unexpected and unrelated to where it's exhibiting itself). :p

Regards,
SB
 

I wonder if AI produced asset generation will become a big cost saver in future?

edit: Looks like the npc scientist guy is being played by Adrien Brody.
 
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You make it sound like it's a bad outcome but compared to console vendors, they'd at least be a decent custodian of Ubisoft property compared to being under the whims of platform politics. Short of being acquired by another big publisher, being under the ownership of Tencent would be one of the more ideal cases since Ubisoft would be able to more easily pivot into live service games with Tencent's expertise in that segment and they'd still be able to do multiplatform releases unencumbered as before all the while shareholder's get to cash out. Nearly everybody wins out under that scenario ...
I'm just speaking from the perspective of having more gaming IP and publishers under control of the CCP.
 
More important than good management (still very important) is rigorous and good code discipline and documentation. It makes it significantly easier to track down bugs. However, even with that there will still potentially be infuriating bugs that will pop up in a project and tracking it down can still potentially take a long and unpredictable amount of time.
One reason for that is you aren't in control of the entire codebase. You have OS, APIs, drivers and tools, plus the interplay of pieces of code written by different developers in your team, some of whom may have moved on leaving legacy code.

I had a brutal introduction to this in my Comp Sci degree. We had a programming exercise, basic string manipulation, on Unix terminals. I had two simple loops but the program wasn't completing. I put a print statement between the two loops that didn't get printed so I knew the fault was the first loop, but I couldn't find anything wrong with it. Eventually I asked the lecturer who said they knew what was wrong but couldn't tell me as it was an assessment. My assignment ended there, barely a third of the marks.

The lecturer then explained that Unix's output, certainly using the instruction I was using in the environment we were working on, doesn't output to the screen until the next write flushes the buffer, sort of thing. So my first loop was correct, the print statement was called but no output produced, and the second loop was failing because of a really simple condition fault that I never looked at because my understanding and expectations focussed me entirely on the first loop. However, how was I supposed to know that printing could result in nothing being printed?! What kind of whack behaviour is that?! :runaway:

You can't be sure of the behaviour of any piece of code you haven't produced yourself, which is most of what's running on a computer.
 
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I'm just speaking from the perspective of having more gaming IP and publishers under control of the CCP.
How exactly is Ubisoft being under Chinese ownership a concern ?

Ubisoft has virtually no value to any country's defense sector and is strictly focused on the entertainment industry so specifically how would the CCP even make use of them strategically ? You can't really even use the propaganda utility argument either because Ubisoft produces so little content at all on modern Chinese culture that is neither helpful nor harmful against the Chinese state or relevant to them. Monopoly ? Every major regulator thinks they're equally bad (outside of strategic industry sectors) whether or not it's under Chinese ownership so that's not a good argument to die on either especially when that's the regulators job to make the determination. Censorship ? Sure Ubisoft has made political and overly sexually/violent gratuitous content before but there's arguably more interference from console vendors like Sony or employees themselves (the gaming industry workforce at large is politically progressive) than there is from the CCP and Ubisoft doesn't have to follow Chinese media laws since they can skip on releasing content in China or release censored versions for the Chinese market ... (there is no such thing as free media and was always regulated even in liberal democracies)

Taking all of the above possible talking points in mind, I assume it's better to see Ubisoft continue making content even if under Chinese ownership than for them to disappear altogether ...
 
Me too. I rather a dev spurge on side mission variety where I might like to repeatedly do one or two types versus a limited number of activities that I care nothing for or wandering aimlessly grinding through enemies randomly spawned throughout the map.
I'm with you here. I like Far Cry but Far Cry 5 is absurd with enemies every 20 seconds. There were enough rednecks in pickups to over-populate New Zealand. Density if activities is really hard to get right but I think it's something that Bethesda hit out of the ballpark in Elders Scrolls and Fallout.

Back to side activities, I really liked what Ubisoft tried to do in Valhalla, where rather than have 5 varieties hidden mini-quests, they are a very, very diverse range but many of them were just dull.
 
Ubi Paris calling for a workers' strike --

Ubisoft Paris called to strike after "catastrophic communication" from Yves Guillemot

"Because Mr. Guillemot and his clique only understand the relationship of power, Solidaires Informatique is calling on the employees of Ubisoft Paris to go on strike."


 
Seems like a big hot mess. I don't even know who would even want to buy them at this point. While Activision had its own issues its easy to just clear out upper management while the company is making money hand over fist. Ubisoft is doing very poorly , the upper management seems terrible and everyone is striking.
 
That just lowers the price. The IPs and studios are worth something.
They just had a content blood bath. There is very few things in development so anyone buying them would be restarting projects based on that IP from the ground up. Then you have games that are in dev hell that have to continue to support. Sure it lowers the asking price but the people who stand to make money by selling likely wont want to take that hit
 
Games are more problematic than movies just due to the way each are created.

Troubleshooting bugs and fixing errors in rendering can be extremely time consuming. Unlike say, reshooting a scene in a movie if an actor flubs their line. One is immediately apparent to the director and they can continue reshooting until it is correct. The other will first need to be found before it can be fixed. And if that bug doesn't pop up until QA on the "gold" build, then it can be incredibly hard and time consumer to fix. So, if it's not a game breaking bug you can ship it and fix it later. However, if it's a progression stopping bug that happens only if X thing is done and doesn't show up until 4-5 hours after the event that triggers the bug, it can be an absolutely massive undertaking tracking that down and you can't ship the game until it's fixed.

Filming a movie is far simpler than creating a AAA game even if the budgets may be similar. Which means it's also far easier to remain on schedule.

Regards,
SB
we could argue that games make much more money than movies -and music-, deservedly so, imho. I am not a movie/series person, the last series I enjoyed where Buffy Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Ubisoft was asking for an acquisition months ago. I purchased some of their games from their Store via PC Gamepass, but not the AAAs people might expect, just Heroes of Might & Magic games and Ikarus Rising. Thing is that once people discover From Software, they mutate.
 
To be fair, the same happens with Sony's studio turnaround; buy some in, kick some out. But to date Sony's have tended to be this strange rotation that companies do, as opposed to MS's current massive dump that is claimed to be economy-based as opposed to 'restructuring and re-evaluating'.

Overall though, is this a good time to buying large studios/publishers? What is the value in Ubisoft? Surely wanting for them to go bankrupt will yield the cheapest access to IP and individual studios. Is the French Government likely to step in at all given Ubi is a significant culture-tech player for France?

From a brutal business POV, I feel holding off acquisitions until these companies are at their lowest just before exiting recession would yield best results, buying cheap and profiting on the economic turnaround.
 
To be fair, the same happens with Sony's studio turnaround; buy some in, kick some out. But to date Sony's have tended to be this strange rotation that companies do, as opposed to MS's current massive dump that is claimed to be economy-based as opposed to 'restructuring and re-evaluating'.

A few of the articles reporting this note that Microsoft recruited heavily over lockdown, presumably because their needs were different. Now that things are mostly back to normal, it's nor surprising the exact numbers and skillsets of people required has changed.

I am only curious about the job losses at Bethesda, but they are about to deliver Starfield and there is often a contraction in shorter-term contract staff at, or near, the end of a project and it may be nothing more than that.
 
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