alt Hacker NewsUbisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
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Stock down over 39% since this announcement, brutal.
It looks like their business model is mostly just remakes and remasters now with these closures. Does the C suite really believe that they can just milk those IPs forever and never create anything new?
It'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.
The 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.
I loved Prince of Persia, bummed to hear the re-launch has been shelved.
A lot of game companies are really committed to building products that their customers hate these days. What happened to talking to your customers?
Their announcement that they were doubling down on everything their customers hate was a choice. The Guillemot family is a cancer on gaming.
"Rising costs." BS. These same companies are also going around saying AI is gonna replace their workforce. Rockstar's been laying off like crazy the last few years, gee, what a shocker GTA VI keeps getting delayed.
It's almost, almost like people are valuable and worth retaining.
Ubisoft is a real thread to all people. I have no problems with them going down. my condulence to all workers loosing there jobs.
'Rising development costs'
Why, we have AI now ...
My kids have been waiting for a Rayman sequel for over 10 years now. Is Rayman not profitable enough?
Ubisoft is a cancer upon the entertainment industry.
I 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.
Older 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.
I 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 and loot boxes to gamble on to get better pixels. Call of Duty and similar games are the next best because it's user-generated content ("UGC"). They still have to invest to create maps, which they don't like doing. But you still have micro-transactions for skins so that's good (for them).
I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey a lot. Some people don't like it because it's too CRPG. That's why I liked it. They paid a lot of attention to the environment. I've heard of teachers using it to portray ancient Greece.
They managed this even though it was a little formulaic. I suspect that any future AC releases will be even more formulaic.
The one exception to this "large game studio = bad" rule had been Rockstar. The various GTA3 titles and GTA4 were widely renowned because of their social commentary and wit, as well as being groundbreaking (at the time) for open world games.
But GTA5 was a turning point for me. Yes it was a sprawling, beautiful environment but the writing was complete ass. It had none of the intelligence and insight of earlier titles. The characters were awful. But Rockstar seemingly didn't care because they're discovered the GTA Online money faucet, something I don't care about at all.
I really wonder if GTA6 will be beautiful but soulless. It coudl go either way. RDR2 was released after GTA5, after all.
These big studios really do have a habit of killing successful franchises or simply sucking the life out of them. There are few bigger fumbles than the EA SimCity fiasco. I guess you can say Civilization has maintained... something. But honestly I haven't really felt compelled to play the franchise much since Civ4.
I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.
They have this amazing engine - MMOGenerator - they change a few skins and boom you got a Far Cry or Assassins Creed game.
This is a 23-year-old game we're talking about here.
The design work was complete long before anyone working on this project was hired by Ubisoft, and proven in the form of a game that shipped several console generations ago. Ubisoft presumably still has all of the original art assets for reference.
All that had to be done was to study the original game code, port it for modern systems, and then polish up the visuals some. Not a trivial amount of work by any means, but much, much easier than starting from scratch and making a game from nothing.
This should've been a layup for any competent studio given SEVEN YEARS(!!!) to work on the project.
That it wasn't, is undeniable evidence of a AAA game development competency crisis.
>Ubisoft will now focus on developing open world adventure games - which let players freely navigate vast environments - and live service games which seek regular payments from players.
Isn’t that what they’ve been doing for a decade that got them to today?
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I 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 journalist because what are they to do, interview a laid-off worker at the business? I doubt someone would go on the record lambasting their former employer, but it would probably turn up the truths such as fraud or waste.