• justsomeguy@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I for one appreciate that ubisoft chose the top down view of poop as their logo. it’s the perfect symbol for everything they represent and they’re incredibly brave for wearing it proudly on their chest.

    • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Yup. Millions subscribe to MMOs and Game Pass. Live service games like Genshin Impact and Fate/Grand Order are incredibly popular. There are also games with crazy intrusive DRM like kernel level spyware and always online DRM that are still installed by millions. How can you look at these stats and not think people are fine with paying for temporary games? If the game is good enough, players don’t care. Ubisoft’s problem is their games aren’t good enough.

  • pseudo@jlai.lu
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    3 months ago

    Shareholders need to get confortable not owning the value of their share.
    Seriously, it in the name: they hold shares not their value.

    • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      They should also get comfortable paying taxes when the of their shares increases. (If only that were true…)

    • Crikeste@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      CEOs need to get comfortable with not existing.

      CEO at my job can’t even do the most menial task in the warehouse. Companies will be fine without their posh little darlings

  • Thann
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    3 months ago

    Shitty companies need to get used to loosing money

  • Glifted@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I want to be optimistic that the industry will learn from these failures but they only ever seem to learn the wrong lessons

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      UbiSoft will fail and get bought up by Microsoft, who will have learned the exact opposite lesson because their stock price went up.

      Meanwhile, Larian will keep churning out bangers until someone eventually offers the owners a too-stupid-amount-of-money to turn down, and then it will be folded into the enshitificatio engine, too. Or they’ll release a flop, lose access to low-interest loans, and collapse under their own weight. Thus proving good games aren’t worth the risk to make.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Man, I really want to assume our lords and saviors will keep putting out perfect games, and yet we’ve been burned in our history.

        CDPR put out a half-baked Cyberpunk after a year of hype. Valve put out “Artifact”, the Dota card game. It feels like the really inventive studios sometimes get tired of the working formulas they’re adored for and end up putting out things not many people like - possibly as a way of doing a personal passion project.

        I’ll be happy if that never happens for Larian, but it’s a worrying possibility.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          For all the shit people give gaming studios, we get a lot of genuinely good games. We also have an enormous back catalog of good games - more than any sane person could reasonably play through in a lifetime. The idea that we’re simply running out of quality content is myopic.

          What we’re getting is diamonds in the rough. A handful of beautiful pearls in a river of shit. Even if Larian fails, there will be other studios that release other games that will be the “Good Games” of their era. The question is whether we’ll be able to see them in the Tsunami of AI generated diarrhea that saturates every tool we use to interact with developers.

          • Katana314@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            The other thing I worry about is for people to be genuinely too blinded by reputation to give games a chance, or to give meaningful feedback that helps those diamonds come to existence.

            I feel like there are some timelines/realities where big publishers like EA / Ubisoft put out a genuinely good game. And it has happened - Titanfall 1/2 are darlings to a lot of people. I’d say Mario + Rabbids was genuinely fun and had great music. I’ve watched streamers play Star Wars Outlaws, and while no, it’s not a fantastic game and I don’t plan to buy it, I can see a few touches I can appreciate. The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.

            Remember that Valve had to work with Sierra (a big evil publisher) as they were starting, before eventually going solo. I worry that the next decade’s Valve is going to get trashed because at the time of their next release, they were “Ubisoft Southern Northland” and “ubisoft = shit”.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              The fact that players basically chuck it in the “Ubisoft = shit” bin to go on hate-tirades without having much of substance (or better yet, to put their energy into praising games they liked) to say seems to doom us by our own expectations.

              Its easy to forget that a lot of these overarching publishing houses have a bunch of smaller shops underneath. Larian could just as easily have been a small house operating under the Ubisoft or Activision or Sony mega-publishing brand. The problem with these small studios is how the parent company routinely shoves them into crunch mode and guts their staff between launches. Ubisoft Zurich, for instance, was spun up to develop MMOs for the German/Swiss market, but shuttered two years later when the parent company decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Wolfpack Studios, started in 1999, was bought up by Ubisoft in 2004 and shut down two years later, with the founders having abandoned the project to start a new studio.

              Mario + Rabbids looked fun, without a doubt. But who knows what’s going to happen to Ubisoft Milan and Paris in another five years, if the gaming market continues its downturn? When all the talented developers are laid off and the remains of the studio become a bunch of poorly paid prompt engineers, what is a sequel going to look like?

    • dan@upvote.au
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      3 months ago

      The fact that so many people use Steam mean that gamers haven’t really learnt either. Some games are DRM-free on Steam, but a lot aren’t.

    • yamanii@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yep, after the bombing of Suicide Squad’s game, and Hogwarts selling 24 million units, Warner’s exec said they would still try to push live services.