1000 x 70000 gross salary or whatever = 70 mil. 70 mil isn’t endless amounts of money in the managerial world, actually.
Executive paycuts aren’t going to cover the delta of 1000 job cuts per year. Everyone loves to cite that one time Nintendo did that, but the math just usually doesn’t work out to the point where this solves layoffs or something. What’s going to get them out of financial fuckery and keep their talent retained is if they stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on projects like Hyperscape, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar that people don’t want and instead make games that their customers do want.
Carighan@piefed.world 23 hours ago
edible_funk@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Didn’t both those games review and sell well? They were both polished and pretty fantastic actually.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I listed three games, but you mean the two that weren’t free to play? No, they sold way under what they would have needed to break even and reviewed fairly middling. They put work into them post-launch, including a Switch 2 port for Star Wars, but back of the napkin math says that’s still nowhere near enough to help them out financially. And again, it doesn’t mean these games were terrible, but the market is showing that they’re generally not interested at the level Ubisoft needs them to be. Hyper Scape was a huge pile of money set on fire, too.
edible_funk@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I’m not familiar with hyperscape but the other two are about 70 on metacritic. That’s a pretty great score considering launch performance. But then no game in the last five years at least has launched without shitty initial performance. Where are you getting information about sales numbers though? Most publishers are very vague about hard numbers what with the bullshit subscription services but I didn’t see anything that indicated they lost money on either title.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Around a 70 isn’t typically a great score, no, not as it tends to affect copies sold. Sales numbers are estimates extrapolated from physical sales, and often times shared with analyst partners like Circana; plus you can extrapolate Steam owners from things like number of reviews and random sampling from profile data and SteamDB. It is all vague. It also all points to these games severely underperforming, not to mention the layoffs that came in their wake. While still vague, you can find articles about Ubisoft’s CEO excusing Star Wars Outlaws’ performance for failing to “meet expectations”, not celebrating a success.
AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Instead they can waste hundreds of millions on executive salaries.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The CEO makes $1.5M per year in cash, so I very much doubt they’re spending hundreds of millions on executive salaries.
omarfw@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Imagine tanking a company through sheer incompetence and then being paid 1.5 million a year anyway.
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Okay, criticize Ubisoft and other publishers for a lot of shit, but in my view things like Star Wars Outlaws are off limits.
Is the game amazing? No. But it’s an idea using a fresh character in an underserved IP. They put together a lot of things based on unique ideas - and it didn’t hit.
That’s a consequence of a company taking risks, even though we generally want them to take risks. They put out 8 new singleplayer IPs, 7 are junk to be forgotten while one becomes the next Halo franchise.
Taking paycuts to execs can better excuse paycuts at low level, and can slow the bleed if the company is to accept going into the red during a new game’s development.
I’ll agree with you that a lot of projects are getting overfunded. Good games don’t need thousands of people working on them. It can help with tertiary objectives like accessibility, marketing, or other features.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I have no criticisms myself for Star Wars Outlaws, as I didn’t play it, but the market didn’t want it, and Star Wars is for sure not underserved. I have been inundated with so much Star Wars since Disney bought it that I’m sick of it, and I’m not even seeking it out. The other thing I’m sick of is the Ubisoft Open World Game. I’ve played a lot of those. They built an efficient machine for churning those out. The market seems to be sick of them, too, at least relative to its former appetite. It’s not surprising that people are tired of both Ubisoft’s formula and Star Wars. You take a risk with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a moderately budgeted game. You don’t take a risk with $200M+; that’s lunacy. Even with The Lost Crown, they reminded me via their Ubisoft launcher and additional DRM why I haven’t missed purchasing Ubisoft games for so many years.
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
That’s a bit too far in the other direction, innit?
Games (or anything really) don’t get immunity from criticism just because they take risks
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Even I said in my comment it wasn’t a fantastic game. It likely could have been a lot better, and I don’t fault anyone bored by it. But I take issue with claims it shouldn’t have been made - that greenlighting it alone was the mistake.
“Don’t make bad game, dummy, just make good game” isn’t a tremendous observation.
Sometimes I don’t even think the way people summarize Ubisoft games as “open world” is a good descriptor of their failures. I will see people meanwhile applaud dozens of games that can all qualify as “open world”.
Maybe Ubisoft is deserving of a lot of criticism, but I’d also put them in perspective against an Xbox that is canceling studios and games left and right, and a Sony that just isn’t making anything except 8 more Last of Us remakes. No clue if EA even makes anything anymore.
edible_funk@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Yeah outlaws was great, we get a fun non Jedi star wars story that feels part of the universe and stays open for room for more? It was a damn good time and I enjoyed Kay Vess as a character.