Ubisoft's Problems Have Finally Caught Up with Them | Unpacked

Lots of changes are coming to Ubisoft as their long-running issues have finally caught up to them financially.

[Tyrfing]

The fact that stealth had to be ‘reintroduced’ to Assassin’s Creed of all things is the most damning line in this video.

[Tzilandi]

A DOZEN Battle Royale titles all in development at once?! What?! WHY?!

[guybrushX]

It's funny, they refused to make new Rayman games, saying they wouldn't be profitable, but were burning money at a rate of nauts to chase Fortnite.

[RayneOfSalt]

Let's not forget that ubisoft covered up the executives' horrendous abuse of staff and has done absolutely nothing to change their practices, except to dig deeper on protecting the executives and favoured employees from any consequences for their abhorrent behaviour.

[DannYIIF]

"Ultra polished" is the now code for "does what it says on the packaging"

[Seoul_Soldier]

"How dare gamers expect a product to work on day one?" -Ubisoft

[c.m.]

X-D
„Players expect polished games from day one…“
Yeah?! Players expect the stuff they buy to actually work from the get-go?! Shocking!
Seriously, videogame industry… the only place where „we expect the stuff we buy to work“ is not taken as a given.

[MrocnyZbik]

As one Cobbler said about Ubisoft:
"By the time you realize your formula doesn't work anymore, you will have 10 games with that formula DEEP in be too late to change by then.

[lyinarbaeldeth]

Maybe sales are down because the complete product now costs $200+ at a time when many potential customers are struggling just to afford the inflated prices of food and shelter.

[converseroo]

“Ultra polished” = wanting a game that actually works and doesn’t, oh I don’t know, make you delete your save with all your early access progress on…

[wcjerky]

Paying for early access? Bud, you're paying to be the final bug tester before the launch. Your money is better spent on _Bastion_ if you haven't played it yet.

[yurisonovab]

Ubisoft memo: "I caused this problem, but you get blamed for it. Now fix my mistake"

[mohireza]

I believe Far Cry 3 was the main reason for Ubisoft's downfall.
They simply peaked with that game and suddenly, they had a golden formula that could be applied to any action adventure title. And they went for it.
What they forgot to take with them though, was the mature and amazingly well-written themes and characters.
They even tried to invent a formula for those stuff with FC5, but we all know you cannot formulate talent.

Goodbye Ubisoft, I don't think I'll even miss you.

[philallen]

I find it mind-blowing that game budgets can be so high, yet they apparently cannot stretch to proper QA testing. Not that it is unique to Ubisoft.

[Crocogator]

Only 1 million over a month for a *STAR WARS GAME* is absolutely insane. They dropped the ball so hard on that one. It's just... Boring. Who wants to use a pistol forever? Who wants to do the same outpost mission over and over?

[putowtin]

I watched someone play Star Wars Outlaws and it looked like they were playing Watch Dogs 2 with a Star Wars mod.... thats the problem I have with Ubisoft, their big AAA games feel like reskins not fresh games

[sameoldsameold]

Even their "break glass with AC in Japan in case of an emergency" is backfiring.

[satyasyasatyasya]

*this isn't difficult*
1) you can't have infinite growth in a finite system.
2) the money that people should have to buy things, is stolen/hoarded by the corpos trying to sell things.

[asms]

The whole point of live service is that it's a game you keep coming back to forever and don't play much of anything else. The model itself leads to market saturation as there are only so many people to play these games, and only so much time they have to actually invest in a live service.

Meanwhile their single player games are the same paint by numbers formula without innovation, so why invest in a new Ubisoft game when you have a massive backlog of games for cheap that do the same thing, or other companies that are doing their formula but better (Sucker Punch).

[FOL]

there's a reason they say "vote with your wallet"
and "DO NOT PRE ORDER"