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“Shareholders need to get comfortable not owning their yacht”
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The truly rich people own the banks. Its their world, we just rent some space in it.
Companies need to get comfortable not owning my money!
Shit I’m getting confortable not having any money and I don’t like it
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.
I thought it was symbolizing them circling the drain, at least when it comes to quality…
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He means like the stylized anime or emoji one ya dullard. 💩
Looks like gamers got comfortable with not owning Ubisoft games, just like he wanted.
They could have got away still if they actually make good games
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.
Making good games is probably not as easy as it seems though.
you seem to be 300x more knowledgeable than the suits that run these companies
So is spending hard earned salary on a Ubisoft game
Shareholders need to get confortable not owning the value of their share.
Seriously, it in the name: they hold shares not their value.They should also get comfortable paying taxes when the of their shares increases. (If only that were true…)
CEO’s need to get comfortable not owning anything anymore
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
Shitty companies need to get used to loosing money
The 5 year price graph is much nicer to view.
I originally used the 5 year one but I thought it wouldn’t be as “accurate” to their most recent disasters
Ubisoft will look up and shout “save us!”
And we will whisper
Why’d you post a picture of my parents arguing about me under the word no?
Ali I see is a “pretty butterfly”
Pretty sure it’s a hip bone X-ray of someone without a spine
I think you’re right but you missed the Pawn piece stuck up their ass.
What are you talking about? Those are two rabbits sharing a cup of tea.
Two bears high fiving.
Wrong. It’s Turian bone structure.
Clearly two bears high fiving
Two skulls kissing
Hate to say it but I think you have schizophrenia
I want to be optimistic that the industry will learn from these failures but they only ever seem to learn the wrong lessons
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
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.
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.
Investors: You didn’t do it sneaky enough! Shhhh
Of course I’m really not a fan of whatever they do and I would never buy an Ubisoft game for at least a decade now, but I still think that a lot of people should don’t know what buying means and that they never, ever bought (and hence owned) a game or movie. Those are not material goods like a car, which you can physically transfer from one person to another. Those are intellectual goods, and ownership here means you own all rights for it, which usually only the publisher has. What you buy online or in a shop is mere a license to watch/play/use/whatever and a medium with the associated data (like a DVD).
Therefore “piracy” had never been theft (or robbery, as it is called so nicely on German news). It is a license violation. Just that doesn’t sound as demonizing as the publisher want it to sound.
It’s really very simple:
- When it’s for the benefit of the Owner class (in this specific case mainly Publishers) it’s ownership hence people are told they’re buying games (only to discover after paying that it’s not so) and piracy is described and even in some countries treated as Theft.
- When it’s for the benefit of citizens in general it’s intellectual property and it’s not really owned by them when they buy it (only licensed, often in such a way that they can lose access to what they were told they were buying) and if they do happen to created intellectual property themselves it can easily be taken away from the by the Owner class who “curiously” even in those countries which treat Piracy the same as Theft won’t be criminally held responsible for it.
It’s the good old “one rule for thee another for me” so popular with authoritarians, especially Fascists (which probably explains why Germany is one of a few countries in Europe that criminalizes piracy, but de facto only treats it as such when it’s the little people doing it).
Are you calling the Federal Republic of Germany fascist?
There are way too many of the “old ways” still around in Germany, from a surveillance culture and a very propagandistic Press activelly indoctrinating people to them continuing to support an ethno-Fascist state committing a Genocide with weapons very overtly because of their race and German courts convicting people for “anti-semitism” when they say the “from the Land to the Sea” saying (which is about Israel, not the Jewish Religion) but not doing the same for actual overt racist statements and behaviors against other ethnic groups.
The rise of the AfD has happened in a field well plowed by mainstream German politicians with the idea that people’s worth depends on race, with some races being deemed good (ubermenschen) and others bad (untermensched) - they might not use the same words anymore, but they certainly share that same view of Mankind.
The apparatus of the State and even the Justice System in Germany is riddled with the very same ideas about people - the racist idea that people’s value is determined by their race and some races are better than others - that served as the foundation of Nazism.
Cars have copyright too you know, you can’t make another car that’s exactly like a Civic and not get sued, and we still own them, so what are you even on about?
That is a patent, not a copyright. If you sell you car, you don’t have it anymore. If somebody steals your car, you don’t have it anymore. What I’m on about is the difference between material and intellectual goods. You can read it up, if your school didn’t cover it.
And if I sell my disc I don’t have my game anymore, what’s so different about it?
Pretty sure their recent stock drop has more to do with them releasing a bad game based on a dying IP than on what an exec said months ago.
I wouldn’t know it’s a bad game since I won’t buy it because of what an exec said months ago.
Given how often we see games selling extremely well even after the companies behind them do awful stuff you’re in a very small minority.
I may be. I don’t care though. Every shit move they make will make more people like me and eventually the message will be heard. When their stock tanks like this, there will be changes.
Cool? Who else do you kick for doing the right thing?
The announcement of the game left an extremely bad impression too, because the game was $60 or $70 but didn’t include all the content, there were three other tiers or “editions” you could buy, the last option being the $8 subscription service that had a shiny blue border around it and included all the content.
Wow, I had no idea they pulled that bullshit too. Fuck that.
Isn’t Ubisoft infamously known for this subscription model on all of their products?
I thought Ubisoft was known for their shitty launchers.
Why not both?
The greed goes deep. It’s funny that micro transactions hardly ever were micro. If it’s was a few cents for a pure cosmetic item I might even do that from time to time, but take the discord cosmetics 50ct I might buy sth blinky, but they want 5-10€ for that shit
you mean to tell me you don’t want to spend $12.99 to be patrick star in discord?? whats wrong with you man
It’s crazy
I call this “The curse of Might and Magic”. This franchise was established by Jon Van Caneghem who founded New World Computing. The company later got into financial trouble and was absorbed by 3DO. Over time (mainly due to the commercial failure of its console, which came after the acquisition of the M&M property), 3DO started slipping into the hole. It dissolved, and in its fire sale, Ubi purchased the rights to Might and Magic. The rest, as they say, is history…
So, it’s the Hope Diamond of Computer Game IPs?
They better sell that IP to The Smithsonian.
BTW what do we have to pay an entry fee to The Smithsonian, and The British Museum is free to anyone that can make it there? Seems like something our taxes should be taking care of…
Unless they changed something in the last year or so, all the Smithsonian buildings in DC have free admission.
Oh good! I just remember the last time I was in DC, I had to pay admission. That was in the mid '90s so, I’m guessing they managed to fix that later.
At least we have that fanmade expansion for Heroes 3.
And before that, Swords of Xeen, as MM 5.5. But other unofficial spinoffs, in particular the King’s Bounty series, weren’t half bad, either.
man, do I miss might and magic. I think imma play through Xeen again soon.
World of Xeen? Such a fun concept, combining the two games. I’ve been trying to run the mod that lets you play 6, 7 and 8 within the same game, but my current PC can’t handle it.
hold the phone, i need that in my life!
