Ubisoft is a cancer upon the entertainment industry.
Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#42Older companies lose that burn that drive the mission. Eventually it's just meetings on meetings on meetings. Many people leave to join small games startups now.
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#43[dead]
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#44I dislike that an executive is quoted as blaming "rising development costs", essentially blaming the workers/salaries, with no rebuttal. This is especially suspect with the timing of closing an office that just unionized. It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages. And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the…
I mean he couldn't possibly blame it on the low quality of their games publicly, right? /s
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#45It's interesting. I wonder how much large-company disfunction is derailing these things.
Recently Hytale, a would-be Minecraft successor, released early access. That project started around a decade ago as something of an indie project, was purchased by Riot, then cancelled by Riot, then recently sold back to the original project people... who basically undid a lot of fruitless work done by Riot and... as I said... now released as early access. A well received early access as far as I can tell.
I wonder why we don't see more indie games and new developers that are more able rising to challenge what look like dysfunctional incumbents?
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know anything about that industry, but it seems like there's space to make progress for newcomers.
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#46The whole AAA video game industry has been struggling in recent years as oversupply, astronomical development costs, and competition from nimbler AA and indie studios have put a serious dent into their profits. And unlike EA or Activision, Ubisoft no longer has any reliable cash cow franchises, which puts them into precarious position.
But the fact that their only answer to this is doubling down on the strategy that has stopped worked years ago does not bode well for them.
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#47I discovered last night that my company's stock price is higher than Ubi's and we've lost 75% of our value over the last few years. Doesn't seem good.
that's not how stock prices work. look at the market cap or the multiple of it over revenue / profit / employees / whatever comparable metric
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#48I find almost all modern content producers to be a depressing business, fundamentally incompatible with being a large corporation. This includes movies, TV and video games. The problem is the large corporation wants to remove creativity from the process. They want a repeatable formula that they can scale and infinitely reproduce. The wet dream for the modern AAA studio is a "game" like FIFA that has annual releases a…
There are still a few studios fighting the good fight
Rockstar, CDPR (they at least made up for their big mistake), Larian, FromSoft, Naughty Dog, Valve
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#49A lot of game companies are really committed to building products that their customers hate these days. What happened to talking to your customers?
Those customers are problematic so their preferences aren't considered.
Re: Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
#50I dislike that an executive is quoted as blaming "rising development costs", essentially blaming the workers/salaries, with no rebuttal. This is especially suspect with the timing of closing an office that just unionized. It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages. And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the…
Same exec team that swept a shit load of sexual misconduct under the rug.