An Ubisoft insider alleges that the company is not happy with Valve and Steam for revealing concurrent player counts for its various games including Star Wars Outlaws.Fandom Pulse is a reader-supported publication.
Ubisoft isn’t a coherent entity. It doesn’t want anything.
I don’t say this to be glib, or to “well acshually” anything. I say it because it’s core to their issues. The place is a snake pit, where anyone with any kind of sway is trying to Game-of-Thrones themselves into higher positions of power and prestige. The people who are supposed to be helping you make better games are actually just focused on getting some kind of win over Jean-Michelle over on that other project, so that when the time comes to jump to a different position, you have the social capital.
This involves focusing on increasingly niche performance KPIs that change at the drop of a hat. I’m talking really boutique vanity metrics that have nothing to do with enjoyment or sales.
On the business end of things, it also means real geniuses saying things like “streamers should have to get licensing agreements before using out games”, and saying so publicly enough that everybody in the company hears that you’ve said it.
And this is without even touching on the sexual assault and harassment allegations, or the abuses of power.
Thr company cannot want anything because its constituent parts are too distracted by and busy with self-interested civil war, rather than working together to establish any kind of coherence.
Ubisoft isn’t a video game publisher. They’re an office politics survival game. I’m very glad I got out of there when I did.
Ubisoft has always struck me as the sort of place that devs would work when they just want a job in the industry, not when they have passion or vision or really care about what they produce beyond just putting in the work on some corpo gig. To hear that it’s also an ultra-cutthroat social deathmatch office environment just has me wondering why anyone would put up with it.
Ubisoft isn’t a coherent entity. It doesn’t want anything.
I don’t say this to be glib, or to “well acshually” anything. I say it because it’s core to their issues. The place is a snake pit, where anyone with any kind of sway is trying to Game-of-Thrones themselves into higher positions of power and prestige. The people who are supposed to be helping you make better games are actually just focused on getting some kind of win over Jean-Michelle over on that other project, so that when the time comes to jump to a different position, you have the social capital.
This involves focusing on increasingly niche performance KPIs that change at the drop of a hat. I’m talking really boutique vanity metrics that have nothing to do with enjoyment or sales.
On the business end of things, it also means real geniuses saying things like “streamers should have to get licensing agreements before using out games”, and saying so publicly enough that everybody in the company hears that you’ve said it.
And this is without even touching on the sexual assault and harassment allegations, or the abuses of power.
Thr company cannot want anything because its constituent parts are too distracted by and busy with self-interested civil war, rather than working together to establish any kind of coherence.
Ubisoft isn’t a video game publisher. They’re an office politics survival game. I’m very glad I got out of there when I did.
Ubisoft has always struck me as the sort of place that devs would work when they just want a job in the industry, not when they have passion or vision or really care about what they produce beyond just putting in the work on some corpo gig. To hear that it’s also an ultra-cutthroat social deathmatch office environment just has me wondering why anyone would put up with it.
Having worked in similar business environments, I could feel the pain and the deep, deep (oh, so, so very deep) frustration seeping from the post.
Or maybe I was just projecting.