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.
Nah, they pay so poorly that you actually need to be invested in actually wanting to make games to take a job there. But you have to keep in mind that about 40% of people working on a game are not what the consumer world sees as ‘creatives’. Software developers have to be invested in what they’re doing, and often have to be really creative problem solvers, but it’s not a “creative industry”, so their contributions often go overlooked.
From the game design and art side, though, it’s absolutely not an indie publisher. Development is highly collaborative, often involving thousands of contributors across multiple studios that span 2 or 3 continents. There isn’t room for an auteur junior game designer, intermediate programmer, or individual environmental artist. The people who get to exercise creative liberties are the leads, and there’s a handful of them on any game.
This is true basically on any project at any game studio of any appreciable size.
Where Ubisoft really kills the process is in editorial. All of the big publishers have editorial and marketing departments that work closely with each other to try and guide the creative outputs of those project leads towards an outcome that will see some amount of market success. The expectation and goal isn’t even a runaway hit, just for the game to find an audience large enough to pay for the endeavour.
Ubisoft’s editorial department is very influential, which you can see by how every single one of their games looks and feels exactly the fucking same. Everything interesting, unique, charming, or truly creative you do gets chiseled and sanded down into the same shape as everything else once the project actually starts coming together.
It’s a soul crushing process, and if you resist it, you get labelled as “not a team player” and slowly relegated to the back of the room.
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.
or they could - and this is radical but hear me out - develop games people in the pc market actually want to play.
Sure, and then what? Remove their shitty launcher?
Since we’re fantasizing here, why don’t we go big and ask to end the hunger in the world?
Bruh, those arent even in the same ball field. Completely absurd hyperbole
Obviously we will end world hunger before ubisoft gets gud
Genuinely, I would buy some of their games on Steam if they didn’t use their launcher.
Ubisofts being anti consumer? Surprise surprise!
They’re not happy because they think people seeing other people not playing a game is the cause of the problem. They’re wrong - it is the result of the problem - they make bad games, so people don’t want to pay rip off prices for them.
Ubusift needs steam more than steam needs Ubusift. They tried to leave the platform and dictate to their users via their own store and launchers, and then realised people didn’t follow them.
Steam is no paradise - it’s basically a glorified piece of convenient DRM - but it’s popular and they have no reason to bend to the demands of Ubisoft. Plenty of other devs that make good games that are popular have had the concurrent gamers tally work in their favour - helping people see that a game is growing in popularity or unexpectedly popular.
I suspect best case for Ubisoft is their games are somehow excluded but that’ll end up being worst case because then it’ll look like no one is playing their games. And I doubt Steam will want to open the can of worms of publishers dictating which features are or are not allowed on steam.
They’re not happy because they think people seeing other people not playing a game is the cause of the problem. They’re wrong - it is the result of the problem - they make bad games, so people don’t want to pay rip off prices for them.
If you check the number of seeders/leeches in the torrents, there are some games that people don’t even want to play them.
Steam charts taught me about the banana game.
The internet is weird.
I would love for steam to say okay we will do that … and just delist all their games and stop them from listing any future games also… No more player counts…
They gotta con investors somehow!
How about no
