Re: Ubisoft change in strategy?

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 09:50:16 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

Well this* could be interesting even though it looks like a mixture of
facts, opinion and speculation and I can't find any other source for it.
There's a lot about finances/shares but the parts I found interesting are:

Yeah, this is another fascinating development. But it isn't all as
rosy as it appears. It isn't about Ubisoft wanting to make better
games and giving players a better experience.

Instead, it has a lot to do with the Guillemot families attempt to
stave off a hostile take-over rather than a fundamental shift in how
they believe games should work, though. Effectively, Ubisoft is trying
to increase immediate sales by making their games more palatable to a
larger group of people (their previous tactic was to earn income over
the longer term through DLC and live-services).

This new strategy will bring new money more quickly into Ubisoft's
coffers. That's the big reason for releasing their games on Steam
rather than selling them exclusively on UPlay; it gives them a much
wider audience. It's also why generally disliked practices such as the
paid early-release (which was much hated by players for how Ubisoft
did it with "Star Wars: Outlaws") and by streamlining their multiple
releases. It's all about dramatically increasing revenue NOW, to make
the company's status look more palatable to stockholders and
investors. Happy stockholders are less likely to join the rebellion
against the Guillemot family, after all.


Which all sounds good, except there's no real guarantee that this new
policy will last any longer than it needs to reassure the Guillemot's
control. They are currently weathering numerous legal and investor
challenges, largely because the general belief is that Ubisoft is not
performing as well as it could be. There's no guarantee that as soon
as the Guillemots fight off these challenges, they won't turn around
and go back to their rapacious tactics.

If this is really what's happening then I think it's a good thing as
even though I have very little interest in their games maybe it's the
start of big companies seeing trying to screw money out of your
customers at every turn isn't a great strategy and selling games that
people just enjoying playing is. Of course it could be more just to get
the share price up in the short term after it tanked this year.

In general, I agree with the idea that the Guillemot leadership has
not been particularly good for Ubisoft, both in terms of business and
games. The latter is obvious: their games aren't really that good.
They are pabulum; passable feed that fills you up but never really
satisfies. Their ten-thousand editions of each game (some of which,
infamously, don't even come with the game!) is scummy nonsense, the
focus on grindy DLC-pushing gameplay is tiresome, and they're the
prime exemplar of game-companies taking away games you paid for by
shutting down live-service servers.

But even as a business, they aren't doing that well. At this point,
Ubisoft only really has ONE tent-pole franchise (Assassins Creed),
with their other IPs --FarCry, Rayman, Watch_Dogs, and Ghost Recon--
lagging behind in popularity. "Star Wars Outlaws" under-performed. If
"Assassins Creed: Shadows" flops, 2024 will go by without a major hit
for the company. It won't kill the company --even the worst of their
games do well enough financially to make bank-- but from the point of
view of investors, it looks really bad... and a lot of the things that
have led up to this (namely, all the problems listed in the previous
paragraph) is due to the Guillemot leadership.

Of course, I'm not fond of the recommendations by the rebelling
investors, which is to take in more money from private equity firms.
That too often has led to disaster for everyone _except_ those firms,
as their short-term strategies strip everything of value from a
company in order to make immediate profit. But leaving it to the
Guillemots doesn't seem smart either.

The TL;DR of it all is to be very wary and cynical of this news. It is
_not_ at all about making things better for gamers. It's all about a
fight amongst the investors, and any benefits we gamers see will
likely last only as long as that battle continues. And after it's
settled, the company will have to make up for the loss of profits
somehow, and I doubt we gamers will like it in the end.