Ubisoft executives need to become comfortable with “not being employed.”
Unfortunately, that’s not how this works.
This is late stage capitalism, execs are judged on how much money they managed to squeeze out before the company died. They’ll be hired immediately specifically to do it again somewhere else.
The company dying in incidental.
Some will take the blame, take millions as parachute payments, then the low level workers will have their jobs cut.
How much do the Ubisoft executives earn annually? Exactly, f-them. Cliffs Over Dover may have been the last Ubisoft game I purchased.
Really sad because Ubisoft can make games, good ones even. But with out the freedom or time and now talent best they can do is movie licensed games.
Ubisoft is clearly a tone-deaf company. But that doesn’t change that this comment has been frequently cited in some very out-of-context ways.
For those who don’t know, the not-owning games comment was in reply to an investor asking why people were reticent to try out Ubisoft+, their monthly service that lets people play pretty much all their games. He was suggesting many people are not used to the option of mass rental as opposed to ownership. But, many Game Pass subscribers (at least before their price increase) can attest that when the value proposition is good enough, it is an appealing option, wherein you accept impermanent access to get more games. In that sense, he was right.
So far as I can see, the intent of the comment had nothing to do with people who buy “lifetime” copies of their games. There’s separate criticisms to make about poor online implementations leading games like The Crew to be yoinked, and I’m in favor of that regulation. But Ubisoft is hardly alone in the way they’ve mishandled that, and the quote had nothing to do with it. I feel like most people pointing to it have only a vague idea of what corporate greed it represents, as though CEOs just want a way to delete your library and somehow make money from it.
The opinion isn’t even incorrect. I have the XBOX game pass and the value is pretty great for pc users.
I usually pick up a game and play a while then drop it when I get bored, so having a lot of options is great.
Ubisoft just needs to get comfortable with no longer owning their games. 😈
I’ve hated what ubisoft has done to gaming ever since the fc3. Only shining beacons were early siege and rayman games. They have incredible artists and programmers working at it and could make some great games but the directors completely double down on the most generic, most mindeless wide appeal possible. I regret buying wildlands because the setting is unique. The game is as tactical as far cry which is just mindleslly run into camp, use your overpowered character against deaf and dumb enemies and complete the collectable.
I remember “Far Cry Blood Dragon” as the only entry that really stood out. The gameplay was exactly what you described but dialed to 11 (as it should be).
FC 3-6 … same game, identical mechanics, less over the top fun more boring and repetitive tasks. Somewhere at Ubisoft there is someone who is responsible for this, including all the consequences.
Blood dragon was amazing. I probably should give it a go again
FC3 was a game changer. It was absolutely wild in its time. It’s just a shame that all of its successors went the same road… I stopper playing midgame FarCry V because it was… bad. The scenario was shit. The gameplay was shit. The map was huge but lacked substance.
Not for me since i had already played better open world games. Games like stalker which had amazing a life and animals that were programmed to act like real ones rather than spawning a tiger and an antelope 20m infront of you and setting one hostile to other, fc2 which was flawed but the ai interactions were mind blowing like sniping out a guys leg and watching allies drag him to cover, arma, crysis etc. all were better but fc3 was casual, accessable and marketed.
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A year ago Ubisoft exec gave an interview where he said that the next leap in gaming industry should be fueled by gaming subscriptions, and that gamers should get comfortable playing by subscription as opposed to buying and owning game licenses.
He then proceeded to give an example on how players got comfortable switching from physical media and full ownership to digital licenses.
This caused a massive player backlash on the wave of protests against the migration from ownership to subscriptions (aka “You’ll own nothing and be happy”). Ubisoft has got a financial dent as sales and subscriptions dropped, and is now facing a problematic financial future.
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Steam doesn’t do that. Some games on Steam do, but it’s the games deciding to do that, not Steam.
There are many games on Steam that are DRM free and can be played offline and without Steam running or being installed at all.
That’s what happens with DRM and digital licensing, which was considered by the exec to have most players already onboard.
Here, he was talking about gaming subscriptions, i.e. paying a monthly fee to have access to a library of games. Once you stop paying, games become unavailable, and games outside the subscription are not available either. His idea is to make more gamers comfortable with the subscription model despite it taking away any possibility to play when you stop paying.
It is difficult to know where to start, since there have been a lot of unpopular actions. A lot of these are pretty standard for the triple A studios unfortunately. Think DRM with always online and authentication server issues, toxic workplace, decommissioned games by removing the servers for them and not giving ways for people to self host, rehashing existing properties to milk success, having their own launcher so having double layers of authentication, microtransactions, subscription based model pushing, game variants locking out certain content unless more money is payed etc.
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Ubisoft games on game pass require ubisoft logins. Not sure about switch. Steam versions usually require it too.
At this point I think its smart for most people to just pirate ubisoft stuff if they really want to play it.
decommissioned games by removing the servers for them
The pirated version usually works.
Literally all they had to do was make good games
Hey, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was great!
Sadly, that’s not necessarily true: https://youtube.com/shorts/IHZru-6M8BY
I mean, it’s not true inside a bubble. I’m sure there’s some incredible games that have been made by one person that didn’t find the kind of success that Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Super Meat Boy, etc did. But at a giant corporation like Ubisoft, they’re not on their own! They have marketing people, interns, studios and sub-studios, finance people, trend analysts, etc.
Ubisoft has some great IPs. But all of their best games came out over 20 years ago! So yes, quality is not the only thing, but it definitely matters.
Not sure what you mean. They needed more NFTs and AI from what I can tell! /s
Honestly though whenever I hear big companies like this fail, it keeps making me go back to the Steve Jobs interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
How have I never seen that interview!? Thanks, great stuff…
It’s funny it happened to Apple too
Yeah the full interview is a real treat (in my opinion)
Steve Jobs The Lost Interview: https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4
I’m not gonna defend Steve Jobs as a person at all but there’s some real insightful stuff in the interview. Even just from a historical perspective.
Exactly what is happening at Intel right now. History repeats itself.
But then who’s going to reskin my favourite open world games every year?
I’ve always thought they do such a good job at building worlds but are absolute shit on story and content. I wish there was a way they’d just build worlds and then hand it off to someone who knows how to make a decent story. Valhalla and Odyssey had amazing worlds that deserved better stories
Get rid of uplay. I might buy ubisoft games if they weren’t tied to that horrible service
Not just Uplay, but also their activation servers. Their games make calls to their endpoints to authenticate if you own/access the game and DLC. If those activation servers are decommissioned without a replacement, your game won’t activate and you’ll lose access to DLC.
They announced they would do this for legacy games several years ago, and I was going to lose access to all the DLC I paid for with my Splinter Cell Blacklist game that I physically owned on a Wii U disc way back in 2013. Bought all the DLC because I loved the game. After enough gamer backlash, Ubisoft backpedaled and the activation servers remain for now. However, the concern is still there that I’ll lose the stuff I paid for when they decide they can’t serve it anymore or if they go bankrupt. Without them updating the game code or open sourcing it, I lose updates, DLC, etc.
We need digital ownership reform, or else it’s piracy time again. This will especially be critical when Gabe steps down from Steam and new owners are appointed, or if Steam goes public.
The US is kind of a lost cause, but there is an effort out there!
That’s awful, sorry. Sadly, until we globally overhaul the laws regarding DRM, or consumer backlash threatens to destroy the industry (like with music piracy), this kind of garbage will continue to happen.
My god I dread that day.
they MBA’d themselves into extinction
edit; everyone with an mba is only qualified to be a farm laborer
Management will destroy this world.
There’s a world where management is treated as an important but not godly position. Where they are schedulers and arbitrators of conflict, and where they aren’t free from consequences because they’re already at the top. And holy hell it’s also not the place where the position is used to promote someone out of where they’re useful simply because paying a labourer more than a manager is seen as unthinkable. It ain’t this one, but I like to think about it sometimes.
Under New Management :)
Every single MBA holder I have met has been a completely shit human being. Without exception.
They’re qualified to be pig feed.
Well said
Farm labor is complicated and specialized.
Yeah then they’d get to suffer being the incompetent bumbling idiot that does the back breaking stuff. MBA appropriate due to their avarice of wanting to exploit people, to clarify.
edit: Not trying to say farm labor isn’t skill intensive, moreso giving them a taste of their own medicine
And fucking physically hard
Hey now, I know a bunch of farm laborers and started out as one myself.
They are nowhere near qualified for farm labor. That requires being able to work, not just regurgitate platitudes from the most recent bullshit management fad.
Man Ubisoft could be so great but they just land so meh. Watchdogs, tom Clancy wildlands, the division, farcry. They all have potential but just don’t have that last 15%
Splinter Cell just wasting away for years. :(
Anno 1800 is a masterpiece though
So were Rayman Origins and Legends. But those are in the past.
Anno 1800 is pretty recent
I mean… April 2019 is almost six years ago…
That’s roughly half a Skull And Bones development cycle.
The last DLC is from 2022 and every DLC was great. They announced Anno 117 mid of last year and I see nothing that would indicate that 117 would be any less good
That’s because they fear giving that 15% out for free when they could have monetized it.
This is exactly the problem with capitalism, which is intended to be you do a thing i need/like for me i give you money
But was infiltrated by a bunch of people whose only purpose is to give less and less of what i need for more and more money until i tell them to fuck off, meanwhile they accumulated all the money and roam to greener pastures. it is basically like cut and burn farming, where the crops are all given to very few people and all the rest are to deal with the consequences
And they killed Deus Ex
Embracer killed Deus Ex.
Ubisoft Executives need to get comfortable not eating food anymore.
I’m sure they can wipe their tears with hundred dollar bills.
which they got before running the company into bankruptcy?
Exactly
It feels tragic. On the one hand, they made some of my most favourite games especially the Splinter Cell series, and it would be sad to see a once great developer to go. But then on the other, the greedy bastards deserve to go under for ruining some of my most favourite games including the Splinter Cell series.
But seriously though, if Ubisoft do go under, I hope that their IP would go into safe hands, like how Baldur’s Gate franchise has been handed over from Bioware to the competent team of Larian (and I do hope Larian does not enshittify unlike the fate of other companies, such as Ubisoft and EA).
Larian isn’t making another Baldur’s Gate.
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The best thing about it is that they’re not making another BG just because they don’t want to. I think it is safe to say say that they won’t enshitify as long as Swen Vincke is at the helm.
I do hope Larian does not enshittify
They will, as the studio is close to be owned by Tencent now.
If it’s any consolation, probably all the game devs that worked on your favourite titles have left Ubisoft long ago.
They were decent to the Anno series, but honestly that’s probably just because they didn’t see the value in messing with the formula that Anno solidified around the time of the acquisition and it reliably boosts their numbers with strategy gamers who otherwise might not be customers of Ubisoft’s at all
Ubisoft always reminds me of an old pun my Latin teacher taught us: Semper ubi sub ubi. Always where under where.
Semper ubi sub ubisoft
