This is going to be one of those “Ubisoft investigates Ubisoft and found that Ubisoft did nothing wrong at Ubisoft”-situations, isn’t it?
Ubisoft isn’t making money. That’s something wrong as far as the board is concerned.
Nah, this is about money. They’ll definitely find a group of underpaid employees to fire.
They’ll fire the developers that implemented the unpopular features (that they didn’t want to build in the first place but were forced upon them from executives, who, by the way, are due for their end of year bonuses!!)
“The Board has investigated itself and found no evidence of incompetence.”
Nah in this case this is real. The board is investigating the executive leadership, two separate entities. It’s like corporate investigating stores management, in a way. This could mean executives getting fired
Good fuck em
They’ll get payouts which is more money than you and I will ever make combined. I’m hungry. When do we eat?
What it really comes down to is that this type of “safe” game design where you rehash the same game over and over again for 20 years thing used to make a shitload of money, that’s why they all do it, and now it doesn’t. Or at least, they’re discovering that there’s a mathematical maximum amount of times you can rehash something without innovating. And not doing that is too huge a pivot for a huge lumbering company like Ubsioft to make on a reasonable timescale.
This is what’s supposed to happen though. When not enough people buy games to make them profitable, the games have to change, or Ubisoft goes under. Either is fine.
And I feel like half of that 20 years was based on FOMO. “I better get the next Assassin’s Creed or I’ll miss out”, and then it’s all the same crap but they still sold a million of them. People do eventually wise up to FOMO.
Miss out on what? Unity was a buggy mess on launch, skip, the British one was a snorefest. By the time of the reboots, Ghost of Tsushima, Elden Ring and BotW already came out
Well, it also doesn’t help how much they are “accidentally” insulting multiple racial groups trying to make an Assassins’ Creed game.
I don’t think they’re doing that.
deleted by creator
after careful consideration of the management decisions that brought us here, we concluded that 1600 layoffs of low level employees is the solution. those who stay will crunch harder for the same pay to make up for any lost labor so we can keep churning out slop that definitely has nothing to do with our crisis.
I want to reaffirm that we are an entertainment-first company, creating games for the broadest possible audience, and our goal is not to push any specific agenda.
Press X to doubt
What agenda is that referencing? I’m out of the loop.
Oh look. Unpaid internships.
First of all, discriminatory hiring.
second of all,
With more people playing video games than ever before, it is important for us to help build an inclusive entertainment industry that reflects the diversity of our players.
Sounds like an agenda to me.
I suspect you and I have different appreciations of reality and I’d prefer to avoid further conversation.
It’s important to have a diverse workforce, especially in entertainment, because people with different backgrounds will have different ideas. Ideas are the lifeblood of how we improve things, and especially creativity. You people who can’t see this are destined to fail. If you think this is evil rather than smart business to ensure you have the greatest strengths through differences of opinion are really blind. All of history has pretty much shown that diversity breeds creativity and growth. Hegemony breeds stagnation.
Nope. It’s important to have a skilled workforce in gamedev. Hiring based on gender and sexuality means you purposefully pick lower skilled workers in order to fill a diversity quota. Being in gamedev and having lead a team of juniors I can say this with confidence. Skill and motivation is everything, and their genders and sexuality mean zero. In fact, you shouldn’t even see their genders or sexuality. Every worker regardless of background has a unique view, and can provide creative solutions without having to be reduced to their genders, sexuality, skin color.
Hiring based on gender and sexuality is discrimination, and illegal for a reason (and these companies get around it by using unpaid internships). It breeds hate and extremism.
Also, going to need to ask for some source of that claim of yours because historically the most creative and successful games have been made by entirely asian male teams or entirely white male teams, and games with diverse teams have been failing miserably.
Hiring based on gender and sexuality means you purposefully pick lower skilled workers in order to fill a diversity quota.
Incorrect. It means that you pick the best candidate, and when they’re equal you don’t just choose the white man like we always have in the past.
I’m a straight white man. I have no issue with diversity because it makes everyone better.
Every worker regardless of background has a unique view, and can provide creative solutions without having to be reduced to their genders, sexuality, skin color.
Sure, that’s true because everyone has a different background. However, a straight white Christian man would likely never think of some of the things a gay Muslim would think of, because they have faced different issues and been taught different things.
For example, there’s an issue with IQ testing, where the tests were designed for typical western education. However, different cultures can be better or worse at certain questions just by how they’re phrased. Some cultures may think of something geometrically. For example, all math by the ancient Greeks were done with shapes, not numbers. They would solve math problems in totally different and unique ways than a typical modern day western educated person would. They aren’t less smart for it. Their brains were just wired differently because of the way they were educated.
Not every person thinks the same. Cultures, education, oppression, trauma, pleasures, and everything else effect how you think and you you’ll think of. Diversity in thought allows us to take advantage of this as much as possible.
Maybe they should try not making crap games. All that money and they can’t get decent voice actors or writers.
- fire all DEI consultants
- get rid of woke writers
- stop making everything live service
- give devs more time to optimize
- don’t overmonetize your games
literally all they need to do. If you make games that people actually want to play, then people will buy them. And if you want to have lgbtq characters, then do it like borderlands 2, that game got it right in 2012.
Why would firing DEI consultants improve the work?
And if you want to have lgbtq characters, then do it like borderlands 2, that game got it right in 2012.
In what particular way do they differ?
Because things like black protagonists with hip-hop music in the background make no sense in a feudal japanese setting and people are sick of games being abused as vehicles for morality preaching.
An example from borderlanfs two could be Sir Hammerlock, who was introduced as a normal (for borderlands) character early on and later in a side quest was revealed to be gay in passing. That’s the kind of ‘representation’ you want for lgbtq to be “normalized”. In modern games, his story would be one of struggle against straight white oppressors at the end of which there would be a five minute long cutscene in which everybody turns to the camera and informs the player that being gay is normal and that prejudice is bad and that straight white people are inherently evil. I’m overexagerating (spelling?) of course, but you get the point.
Because things like black protagonists with hip-hop music in the background make no sense in a feudal japanese setting and people are sick of games being abused as vehicles for morality preaching.
But games about dudes in medieval-looking sci-fo power armor stomping around WW1-styled soldiers do?
And that doesn’t preach any morals? But a black guy in a samurai setting does? How come one does, but the other does not?
Also…
An example from borderlanfs two could be Sir Hammerlock, who was introduced as a normal (for borderlands) character early on and later in a side quest was revealed to be gay in passing.
Maybe don’t make it as readily apparent how much you internalized gayness being abnormal. Telling. You wouldn’t write sentences like this if that wasn’t a normal thought process for you, since you did probably not have to actively consider your wording.
Bullshit. Normalization means not making a big deal out of it, which goes contrary to the woke standard of putting it front and center.
But like you say, if you want to normalize it, shouldn’t it be front and center then? Since that’s part of being normal, also being front and center?
It cannot be front and center and normal at the same time. It cannot be the main part of a character’s identity, else it will always be perceived as “special” and “extra”, but not “normal”. Devs can make whatever game with whatever chars they want ofc, but the result is what we’re seeing with ubisoft.
I’m just ranting at this point.
It cannot be front and center and normal at the same time.
Why not? If it’s normal, any possible identity and any possible element will be front and center every so often, no? That’s what normality means after all? Something has to be front and center, and if everything is normal, everything will appear there repeatedly?
Every day I grow more and more tired of you braindead idiots.
funny, given that most gamers seem to agree with me, according to sales numbers. Noone wants this shit in games. Perhaps we’re not the problem.
last time i wrote something similar to yours,the left wing nutjobs came rushing in,guns blazing.
god damn wokies.
Yup.
they can start by just making games as gamers want it,not inserting lame ass political agendas in their games or hire politically correct nutjobs to determine how games should be inclusive.
What you mean is making games how you want them to be, not the overwhelming majority of gamers. Stop thinking everything is an agenda designed to limit your freedom.
ubisoft stock price plummeting,black myth wukong having more players than star wars franchise,game with DEI rubbish tanking or having little to no players,yea majority have spoken alright.
I just need you to say the word woke now, and I’ll have completed my incel bingo card.
lol,cope and seethe.
Always suprised when I remember that WatchDogs 2 is from Ubisoft. Such a well made game, i played the crap out of it twice
I wanted to like Steep but the Controller experience, even on the Steam deck is so horrible I didn’t last a full hour
I know there are some changes you can do in settings. I mostly did snowboarding and since I snowboard irl I found the controls were close to how you’d control your feet on an actual board. So that probably helped ^ ^
But rider’s republic mixed it all up so I get what you mean
Did we play the same game?
Maybe they fixed it? I didn’t play day 1 so I’m not sure how it was then (played maybe 2-3 years after it’s release)
I just found it soul less and unbalanced. But then again I was going into it early when they where still calling it the “GTA killer”.
Absolutely not. When the board is looking into it, it’s because they are not returning shareholder value and they are pissed about it. This will likely end with the C-suite being butchered.
Ah yes, I hate being butchered that way, too. It sucks hard to be paid to leave before you get paid extra to start your next job elsewhere.
And don’t get me wrong, if the C-suites actually ever had to take actual responsibility for their fuck-ups, I’d be all for those board investigations. But they don’t. They get paid enough to not care about interims between jobs - just look at the CEO who said people can just spend a year on the beach or so if they’ve been laid off - plus they get paid extra both on the leaving and on the re-hiring.
If they had to pay all non-salary money back on fucking up, even retroactively, no matter how many Porsches they’d have to liquidate to get the money from X years of fucking up the company back, sure. Do it. But that’s just sadly not the case. For a C-suite, this just means changing what name is written under your name, and moving on to the next place you can grift.
I bet they will find embezzlement, possibly funnelled through consultancies.
I bet at first it seems like multiple consultancies, but the more they investigate, the more they realize it’s just minor variations on one consultancy copy-pasted around the map, and at a certain point, investigating each one just feels same-y and boring.
“Ubisoft investigates Ubisoft and found that Ubisoft did nothing wrong at Ubisoft”-situations, isn’t it?
“The consumers are wrong, it’s those damn Millenials again”
Followed by continuing to change nothing and fading into obscurity like Atari or Commodore. (hopefully)
It needs to happen to all the big developers.
Clearly what they need is more management layers and SCRUM masters to streamline the game creation process.
Don’t forget AGILE. That should solve all of their problems, right?
They’re going lean so they’re firing half their workforce so the rest can produce more work. Don’t worry though middle management is safe
And of course, the preferred way is to do it at the office, 5 days a week.
How else do we foster a sense of team if all the devs are not in the office 5 days a week?
Also to promote a sense of community and close cooperation we’re moving to an open office plan. (I.e. packed in like sardines to glorified picnic tables with hot seating and noise everywhere.)
We will be installing clackball tables every 20 feet
and a dozen more external contractors will def make their games better
Here’s one. Your main series assassin’s Creed still has the same glitches and bugs it did 15 years ago. The last one was so much more of the same that it’s the first Ac game I put down and gave up on after an hour cause it felt like I had played it already. How bout building a new game from scratch instead of repeatedly dipping into the same garbage pile and charging premium for it, while your other titles are overflowing with micro transactions and bullshit
Prince of Persia 😴
That new one is a solid metroidvania. It would have been better if they shrunk the map a bit or introduced meaningful upgrades more frequently, but it was still very good.
Management has decided that the real issue is the lack of employee involvement. Mandatory beatings will commence.
