Comment on The Star Wars Outlaws flop - Guillemot blames waning interest in the franchise
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What? I thought Ubisoft was saying sales were really strong and how Outlaws was such a big success?
I’m going to guess this is the exact same case with Assassins Creed. An AC game set in feudal Japan should have been a Grand Slam. Literally everyone wanted it. But leave it up to Ubisoft to find ways to make money from a printer drop right into the shredder.
It’s more than just bugs and “blandness.” Clearly people aren’t buying what Ubisoft is making, and they keep changing stuff but none of the things they change are the reasons people aren’t buying their games. It is crazy to me that executives continue to learn the wrong lesson from failed games 100% of the time.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I agree about what’s happening. They’re producing boring games and not learning anything.
But I don’t give a shit. Let them go down in flames. New indie devs an studios are popping up all the time with fresh, unique, and interesting games. I haven’t bought a AAA game in over a decade and I’m not missing a damn thing.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I partially disagree. I don’t want Ubisoft to die. I want them to make good and fun games, like they used to 15 years ago. I want AAA to be like it once was. And I reward when AAA games are like that by buying them.
Gamers want to give our money to developers and publishers. But we want good quality games that at the very least match (but ideally surpass) the quality of experiences we used to get in the past. Recently, Ubisoft has not been providing that, and thus Ubisoft sales have been plummeting. Now, is this a failure of executives? Developers? I say likely both.
Give the developers autonomy for one game, where there is zero executive involvement in the development and see how it goes. If it does well, then just let them make another game with full autonomy. If it goes poorly, make employment cuts on the team or move them around because clearly they didn’t do well even without executive direction. But also keep in mind if another huge competitor takes over, like releasing next to GTA6, pretty much every other games sales will suffer most likely (unless its $100 at launch lol).
Its not a hard decision to make when it comes to business. Any person with a single braincell can see this. The problem is that giving a studio full autonomy is a financial risk. There is great potential for failure when executives feel like they have no control. Businesses are too risk averse now to make such simple decisions. They would rather maintain control of a sinking ship instead of giving crew members autonomy to try to right the ship. Its crazy to me.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I want to give my money to a dev with a passion and a good idea. I do not want to support a soulless corporation grinding away at an IP to maximize profits for the next quarter.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 day ago
All developers eventually become “soulless corporations grinding away at an IP to maximize profits for the next quarter.” They have to, because otherwise they die forever and take their IPs with them to the grave or sell them to corporations.
Support who you want, but understand that the developers who work for Ubisoft, at the very least some of them, have passion and good ideas. There are circumstances that can lead to those people not being at the surface or even being intentionally held back/bullied from realizing those ideas.