The employees should form a cooperative, they are the ones with the skills, the actual producers
That’s a shame, that was the studio that worked on Guitar Hero Live. I kind of liked that game
Wow AC shadows pre sale levels must be really bad. Not too surprising tho. For a studio that basically said “there’s way more interesting time periods we want to focus on” the fact they finally went to feudal Japan felt more like they ran out of interesting ideas. Doesn’t help ghost of tsushima beat them by a few years and was basically the best AC game since black flag.
“We are deeply grateful for their contributions and are committed to supporting them through this transition."
So like a fruit basket and a pat on the head?
Lots of hate on ubisoft. I think division 2 is a great game though, not so much the rest.
And nothing of value was lost.
I mean, 185 people lost their jobs.
they should start by laying off executives and commercials who had that veeeery bad ideas of forcing internet connection even on offline mode, forcing Ubisoft Launcher even on steam and thinking that making a game pass with just Ubisoft IP was a good idea…
Spoiler alert: those were finally not good idea at all
Fuck Ubisoft
Sucks for the workers but I hope this continues. Fuck Ubisoft
It feels like a complete bloodbath with the job situation in the gaming industry in the west.
The worst thing is none of the executives are getting fired (in a proper manner, no golden parachutes and clawbacks on any stock based compensation).
Yeah? The executives are firing people, to lower costs, make the numbers look better…? Which makes the owners of the business money?
Why wouldn’t the executives get bonuses or golden parachutes if let go? They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Executives don’t make products, provide services, or add any productive value. They are just the face of the owners, and will do the “hard” things for them.
Like lie, commit crimes, do mass-layoffs etc etc.
Executives are responsible for the direction of the company. They aren’t just there to cut costs (at least, not usually). They’re there to see what opportunities the company to move into, and guide them to success.
This is the opposite of what most executives at these gaming companies have done lately. They’ve driven up budgets and pushed them in a direction that makes people not want to purchase their games, causing them to fail.
If a company has to fire employees then that’s the fault of the executives. They should be taking cuts first, not the people who were doing their job well but were just pointed in the wrong direction.
Do you always argue with people that agree with you? How is that helpful?
The worst thing is none of the executives are getting fired (in a proper more manner, no golden parachutes and clawbacks on any stock based compensation).
lol, welcome to the west
Gamers won. No executives will lose a dime but 185 workers are screwed because Ubisoft bad and Steam good.
Yeah, just go ahead and blame the consumer because the company makes shit product. They keep pushing stuff that the people don’t want. Any business doing this is going to go tits up. That’s just how it works. Are you out there buying 30 extra versions of Far cry to help them out? If not, stfu about it and blame the people in charge, definitely not the consumer.
What does this have to do with Steam?
I wonder who do you think was at fault at the sinking of the Titanic, was it the Iceberg for you?
That’s a stupid analogy. The employees are not responsible for the bad management déecisions, they just want to be fairly paid for doing a job they like. Meanwhile “gamers” are fucking obsessed about trashing a game that isn’t out yet because “nO bLaCK SaMuRai iN my HiStorIc vidiyaGame aBout ficCtiNal chArcTers RuNNInG oN wAlls”. Just dont buy their games.
The travelers of the titanic were not responsible either for the crashing of the ship. Either way you’re missing the point. I didn’t mention a single game, the company which has taken a bad direction because of greed is to blame that developers have now lost their jobs. Not gamers.
We aren’t buying their games, which is why the studio closes.
Ubisoft is bad Steam is good
Steam is just another soul-less capitalist business. They employ less then 100 people but take 30% on every game sold. They would do the exact same things as Ubisoft if the estimate they could profite more from it.
Right, they profit more by being good. Ubisoft profits less by being bad. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
In Skull and Bones they couldn’t even replicate the experience from their own previous IP, and then advertised is as AAAA game. It’s a disgrace - they deserve to burn.
When that game came out I bought AC4 for $5 instead. Had a fun time and the graphics still look modern anyway
I like to think I had a very tiny hand in this, since I never pay for Ubisoft games I play.
I went one step better and didn’t even play them.
I can respect that.
If their customers are going to have to get used to not owning games they paid for, I guess Ubisoft is going to get used to not having money 🤷🏻
Works for steam tho Edit: apparently Ubisoft wanted subscriptions, so steam isn’t exactly comparable
Gross. Good riddance!
In addition to Steam not being subscriptions, Valve has so far not screwed over their users. The way the Ubisoft exec suggested that we should change our attitude really showed what they in plan
Goodwill with your playerbase doesn’t show up on a quarterly report, but without it your company is sunk.
It’s incredible that a company with the resources of Ubisoft couldn’t figure that out, even with people shouting it at them daily.
I think the big “issue” is that there’s a notable lag between loss of goodwill and loss of income/profit/value, and there’s an even bigger lag between trying to fix goodwill and returns on that. It makes it too hard for any profit-first company to get right.
I think you’re absolutely right. When these studios go public and start having pressure from shareholders, it starts the gradual decline in quality.
External MBAs taking over running businesses will either result in this or making a billion dollar company through the heavy exploitation of their workers and the consumers. I think the vast majority are the former though.
I think when all these famous studios were interesting, they still by inertia functioned the way people with actual skills founded them. I’m thinking of BioWare, Black Isle, Obsidian, but reading the history of any famous video game studio gives that impression. It was a rather personal business in 90s and early 00s, it seems.
Then the “professionals” came and started “fixing” everything, and something about today’s computing makes me personally deeply disgusted of anything advertised there.
I don’t want a shooter not better than a hundred Q3 clones, but taking 50GB disk space. I don’t even want it with “photorealistic” (no they aren’t) graphics. I don’t want CK3 because it’s slow and has too much bullshit happening, the secret of success is in quality of content more than amount, and more is not always better if a player gets bored with small events. I admit, I haven’t tried Hogwarts Legacy, put from what people say its open world is as useful as Daggerfall’s map the size of England, because most things on that map are all the same, though as a dungeon crawler Daggerfall is still better than typical modern game. And Star Wars - its Expanded Universe mostly came into existence in the 90s, it’s designed the way very convenient for all kinds of video games, or any entertainment and any secondary art at all, and George Lucas approached that theoretically before making the first movie (the “obscenely huge profits” part he may or may not have considered, but it came as a welcome bonus, I suppose), and still every modern time Star Wars game is just not interesting to me ; my favorite one is KotORII, so there is, of course, a gap between me and the majority, but it’s still baffling how didn’t they even try to make an X-Wing remake.
One can go on. People want to play interesting games. Very few people play games because of “more, better, wider” in ad. The whole idea of a game is to be interesting. It’s entertainment. It’s not “I’ve got a new iPhone and you don’t” dick size contest. Some game being very technically cool, but absolutely bullshit in gameplay, writing, UI design, character design, location design etc, - is not entertaining. Some other game being technically a visual novel (not necessarily), but with all those things done well, - it is entertaining.
So, making a good game doesn’t even require a lot of very competent and very stressed CS heroes working since dawn till dusk to the extent of their ability.
Simplified: capitalism made these studios shitty, just as it’s done for gestures broadly
