Ubisoft Sellout - Bankruptcy Speedrun Any% Thread

[Tanner Glass]

The gaming industry is so weird in a business sense because it constantly seems that their entire management class has never taken any basic business lessons. Always amazes me that their management has zero business common sense.

The management class is made up entirely of just "business lessons" - the days are long gone where you get a Todd Howard/Miyazaki going from "Game Developer" to CEO.

The issue is that while the management knows "business lessons" - they don't know the product. They have no idea how the product works and assume all products are interchangeable. "Oh people want Live Service Team Shooter? Let's Make Live Service Team Shooter" and that's as far as it's thought through on a management level. They don't even differentiate studios anymore - because they're all just factories to the business.

You see it all over - XP boosters in Single Player games, BioWare (one of the more storied RPG studios ever) working on a PVE Mech Team Shooter, Diablo Phone Games, Multiplayer Dragon Age, and so on.

They really don't get it because a lot of other industries you can just make iterative products - even in Entertainment. A lot of pitches are just "Something meets Something Else", like "Star Wars meets The Office" or "Game of Thrones but Modern", or whatever. Honestly for a while even in Video games they got away with it - Assassin's Creed is largely just "Assassin's Creed in <new location>" until they started tampering with it. A lot of other industries you can get away with "oh no our movie didn't do well, must have been that harassment campaign" and just move on.

I've yet to see any signs of the kind of radical changes necessary to steer the ship around over at Ubisoft. All they've done is shuffle what little worthwhile intellectual property and talent they had left onto a separate entity, and then put the dumbfuck son of the reigning jester in charge. I doubt the apple has fallen all that far from the tree.

That's because they're not trying to right the ship. The CEO/Board/etc are trying to take from Ubisoft what they can before the ship runs aground and then flee with their ill gotten gains. At some point they realize there isn't much in the way of coming back from this all. There's a large part of business investing that revolves around profiting from a dying company as much as humanly possible before it fully dies (see also KMart famously).

The amount of complete bombs that Ubisoft has released is indescribable. Skull and Bones was eating Dev salaries for a full decade, Star Wars Outlaws bombed hard and so did Assassin's Creed Shadows. They also invested heavily in XDefiant only to get it barely operational for a single year before losing the entire player base and closing the studio that made it.

These are all massive bombs and there's no reason to think they can recover and they're at least smart enough to see the writing on the wall.

 

[p1138]

That's true, still doesn't change the fact that it was more noble than the western CEOs who airdrop in, tank the company, then exit with a golden handshake despite doing absolutely fuck all.

The ones that get away with that do so because it was negotiated when they were hired. The golden parachutes aren't just happening because they left. The no salary thing is also kind of a misdirection. Sure they don't take a salary or it'll be something symbolic like $1, but that doesn't take into account the equity they already have in the company worth even more or are still receiving equity awards(stocks) as part of their compensation package.

Like Steve Jobs and his $1 salary when he returned to Apple, but also had a billion in stock options plus personal investment in Disney and elsewhere. The salary wouldn't have meant a damned thing to him.

 

[George Lucas]

The other missing ingredient is that even if the president was still in the picture if he's not a gamer then it isn't worth fuck. Having someone like Satoru Iwata or Shuhei Yoshida stick his head in the door and have a look was valuable because they understood gaming and could offer valuable feedback. Their opinions were respected.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo until the Gamecube era, famously never played video games. The problem isn't in being a gamer. Yamauchi had pride in the company and wanted it to be successful. He spent time visiting the offices and seeing what his developers were up to. He wasn't just some guy phoned in to raise numbers and collect a bonus.

It's like how Warren Buffet manages Berkshire Hathaway compared to a typical investment banker. Buffet would actually visits companies, talk to workers, see what their processes and workflows were like, etc. He was not an expert in any of it, but he was able to make good decisions because he involved himself and didn't just look at numbers on a computer.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo until the Gamecube era, famously never played video games. The problem isn't in being a gamer. Yamauchi had pride in the company and wanted it to be successful. He spent time visiting the offices and seeing what his developers were up to. He wasn't just some guy phoned in to raise numbers and collect a bonus.

It's like how Warren Buffet manages Berkshire Hathaway compared to a typical investment banker. Buffet would actually visits companies, talk to workers, see what their processes and workflows were like, etc. He was not an expert in any of it, but he was able to make good decisions because he involved himself and didn't just look at numbers on a computer.

He was also descended from the company's founders, a "nepo-baby," as this thread would call it. But he was also a keen businessman and visionary, far more than you'd expect from the hereditary owner of a playing card company. Sometimes a business just gets lucky like that.

 

[p1138]

Ubisoft is basically a cargo cult now, but instead of niggers imitating Western military parades to summon planes with gibs, it's a collective of unqualified niggers, faggots, dykes, feminists and other welfare cases squatting on company grounds and pretending they're making games.

You're really not far off on that.

https://thatparkplace.com/ubisoft-blames-disney-lucasfilm-and-state-of-modern-star-wars-for-failure-of-star-wars-outlaws/

“Outlaws was released at a time when the brand that it belonged to was in a bit of choppy waters,” he said, shifting the blame from Ubisoft to Disney. He elaborated that there was “less interest in the franchise” at the time, suggesting the broader Star Wars IP had lost some of its cultural pull. Guillemot expressed hope for recovery, mentioning potential “further improvements” and a possible Nintendo Switch 2 port to boost sales.

It's not due to being a shitty buggy game, Yves Guillemot the chief shaman has said that the employees did all of the rituals to make money rain down, it's those fuckers at Disney that ruined everything... not that Outlaws was just another example of modern shitty Star Wars. If it weren't for Disney fucking up Star Wars, people would have just blindly purchased their shitty game... except we've seen other star wars games in recent history get rejected by gamers for being shitty with Battlefront and Squadrons from EA being garbage.

 

[harbringer883]

I've yet to see any signs of the kind of radical changes necessary to steer the ship around over at Ubisoft. All they've done is shuffle what little worthwhile intellectual property and talent they had left onto a separate entity, and then put the dumbfuck son of the reigning jester in charge. I doubt the apple has fallen all that far from the tree.

It's obvious they've learned nothing from the past decade of embarrassing debacles, nor did Shadows or Outlaws manage to hammer the point home.

They've spent so long beating out the separate identities of all their various IPs they are now only capable of making the one kind of game, and only with the outdated tools no one left at the company knows how to update or replace.

Ubisoft is basically a cargo cult now, but instead of niggers imitating Western military parades to summon planes with gibs, it's a collective of unqualified niggers, faggots, dykes, feminists and other welfare cases squatting on company grounds and pretending they're making games.

They don't have the ability or passion to make anything unique, and even if they did, they'd hobble its chances of succeeding by making it woke enough to alienate the vast majority of costumers.

It doesn't take a Nostradamus to predict their next game will be another generic, buggy, soulless open-world game where you climb something to unlock points of interests, with the same pushing of Marxist ideology as their previous flops, featuring the exact same amount of browns/niggers and unattractive people.

Ubislop is lierally just sitting around and hoping for "le next big thing" to happen from whatever shit they vomit out every now and then.

 

[Kane Lives]

Maybe I'm wrong but I thought that it turned out that there were actually a shit-load more than just 33 people on E33, its just that they were all support studios and other outsiders that the main team chose to pretend didn't publicly exist?

As I understand it, those are 3rd world modelling and rigging studios that they outsourced some of their work too, yeah.

Even with those, I don't think the E33 devs can compare to the bloated behemoths that work on AAA games these days. To bring it back to the Ubislop topic, rumours has it that AC: Shadows team had 17 fucking separate Ubi studios working on it, probably making up >1000 of staff alone.

 

[Lone MacReady II]

It's like how Warren Buffet manages Berkshire Hathaway compared to a typical investment banker. Buffet would actually visits companies, talk to workers, see what their processes and workflows were like, etc. He was not an expert in any of it, but he was able to make good decisions because he involved himself and didn't just look at numbers on a computer.

He was also descended from the company's founders, a "nepo-baby," as this thread would call it. But he was also a keen businessman and visionary, far more than you'd expect from the hereditary owner of a playing card company. Sometimes a business just gets lucky like that.

His daddy was also a U.S. Senator... a man who got rich off Silver, then little Warren spent his entire career saying shit like "Gold is a barbarous relic of the past" while buying it up on the cheap in preparation for the current commodities super cycle we have entered. Dude is a heeb through and through, telling the plebs to do one thing while doing another behind the scenes, and monopolizing so much real estate he'd make a blackrock erect - but that's a conversation for the business threads. Fuck Warren Buffett, I shall toast his end when it inevitably comes, sooner rather than later.

 

[regalterry]

Even with those, I don't think the E33 devs can compare to the bloated behemoths that work on AAA games these days. To bring it back to the Ubislop topic, rumours has it that AC: Shadows team had 17 fucking separate Ubi studios working on it, probably making up >1000 of staff alone.

I remember reading about the sheer size of Rockstar, thousands of employees in their actual studios, and then looked at the list of external contractors and what they were doing for Rockstar, and had to ask myself what the fuck their actual employees were doing.

Rockstar outsourced model making, rigging, art, animation, voice acting, large swathes of the coding most likely, parts of the writing etc.

What do the thousands of Rockstar employees do? What do all those hundreds of fat dangerhairs over at Bethesda do the whole day when jeets were the ones making Starfield?

Apply that to Ubisoft - if they don't have any actual programmers because they make their games with crayons, the writing probably being shat out by an LLM, and everything else done by brown sweatshops abroad, what exactly is the purpose of the massive workforce Ubisoft has?

Most importantly, why do the people running these companies keep all this dead weight around? Is it government gibs, like with Ubisoft, who double dips by fleecing both the French and Canadian taxpayers?

Surely it would be cheaper to replace all the entitled urbanite liberals with a bunch of jeets you can pay a pittance, with a few Brahmin to keep the horde in line. If you're keeping the workforce solely to get gibs and grants, wouldn't that make more sense?

 

[RandomGibberish]

What do all those hundreds of fat dangerhairs over at Bethesda do the whole day when jeets were the ones making Starfield?

I don’t think those “A day in the life of a software engineer” videos were just ads anymore…

Look at that!
That was maybe 3 hours of “work”?

 

[whatever I feel like]

His daddy was also a U.S. Senator... a man who got rich off Silver, then little Warren spent his entire career saying shit like "Gold is a barbarous relic of the past" while buying it up on the cheap in preparation for the current commodities super cycle we have entered. Dude is a heeb through and through, telling the plebs to do one thing while doing another behind the scenes, and monopolizing so much real estate he'd make a blackrock erect - but that's a conversation for the business threads. Fuck Warren Buffett, I shall toast his end when it inevitably comes, sooner rather than later.

I was talking about Hirochi Yamauchi. I would have figured the line about Japanese playing cards would have given it away...

 

[Oliver Onions]

it's those fuckers at Disney that ruined everything... not that Outlaws was just another example of modern shitty Star Wars

I wish I could have been in the room to ask old son Yves why EA's Battlefront II flopped then even though it released at the peak of Disney Star Wars hype (launched in 2017 just before The Last Jedi marked the beginning of the end).

I'm sure he'd say it's because EA suck and that's why they lost the Star Wars license to chad Ubisoft.

 

[p1138]

I wish I could have been in the room to ask old son Yves why EA's Battlefront II flopped then even though it released at the peak of Disney Star Wars hype (launched in 2017 just before The Last Jedi marked the beginning of the end).

I'm sure he'd say it's because EA suck and that's why they lost the Star Wars license to chad Ubisoft.

Hell, it doesn't explain why Jedi Survivor did reasonably well as an asset flip sequel to Fallen Order either, as that came out after episode 9, After the book of boba fett wasted everyone's time, after that laughably stupid obi wan show, and right when the mandalorian season 3 came out that people were bored with... basically right when people were in the middle of being fed up with star wars?

Outlaws, 3300 peak players on steam, Jedi Survivor 67,000 peak players during the peak of being bombarded with shitty TV shows after shitty movies. Hell the damned 24 hour peak for jedi survivor is still 2600, almost as much as the lifetime peak for outlaws and it launched a year earlier.

 

[RandomGibberish]

Ubisoft has always been anti-consumer since at least Ass Creek 2 on PC.

‘Member when you had to be always online for a SINGLEPLAYER game SIXTEEN YEARS AGO?!

Couple that with the Ubishit Launcher and people couldn’t even play their AC2 game on launch because the login servers constantly crashed lmao

At the end it didn’t matter anyway because there were cracks shortly after launch that simulated the login server.

So anyone wishing for a Ubisoft like the “good old days” needs to know that Ubisoft has always been like this.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Hell, it doesn't explain why Jedi Survivor did reasonably well as an asset flip sequel to Fallen Order either, as that came out after episode 9, After the book of boba fett wasted everyone's time, after that laughably stupid obi wan show, and right when the mandalorian season 3 came out that people were bored with... basically right when people were in the middle of being

Jedi Survivor also runs like absolute shit on consoles, even in Performance Mode on PS5 when I played it there was constant screen tearing and pop-in. I wouldn't expect that lack of polish from a no-name developer, never mind one of the biggest names in the business.

Anyway, I'm starting to think Yves might be a fucking liar.

 

[p1138]

Jedi Survivor also runs like absolute shit on consoles, even in Performance Mode on PS5 when I played it there was constant screen tearing and pop-in. I wouldn't expect that lack of polish from a no-name developer, never mind one of the biggest names in the business.

Anyway, I'm starting to think Yves might be a fucking liar.

For sure, it ran like shit and didn't sell crazily well, but still a couple orders of magnitude better than fucking star wars outlaws.

And of course Yves is a fucking liar. It's just gotten to the point where it can't be ignored anymore when he says some nonsensical shit because the company is so fucked they've gotten a life raft from China and immediately fucked that up as well with their appointments to manage it.

This game did even worse than Outlaws, and the only thing they have going for it as adding a third person mode? Whoopdeefuckingdoo. But more importantly, it seems people have finally noticed something weird about the video descriptions

For the 2024-25 fiscal year, Ubisoft generated net bookings of €1.85 billion. To learn more, please visit: www.ubisoftgroup.com.

What the fuck?

Ok, lets check a video from January 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDpDOSbHc00

For the 2021–22 fiscal year, Ubisoft generated net bookings of €2,129 million. To learn more, please visit: www.ubisoftgroup.com.

So for that one it wasn't even current? Flipping back through their video catalog they've been doing that since since at least 2022... the game trailers and shit are for customers, not investors. Ubisoft has clearly not had any idea who the fuck their customers are for years.

 

[THE URANUS SPOTTER]

When far cry 7

 

[DeadwastePrime]

When far cry 7

one day
eventually

 

[GetToTheChoppa]

Ubisoft has always been anti-consumer since at least Ass Creek 2 on PC.

‘Member when you had to be always online for a SINGLEPLAYER game SIXTEEN YEARS AGO?!

Couple that with the Ubishit Launcher and people couldn’t even play their AC2 game on launch because the login servers constantly crashed lmao

I 'member. This was during their infamous "over 90% of all PC gamers are pirates" phase lol.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/guillemot-as-many-pc-players-pay-for-f2p-as-boxed-product

With such a hostile attitude towards PC gamers it's no wonder they were the first pioneer multiple invasive layered DRMs on their games at once.

Some had up to 3 stacked on top of the other (VMProtect, Denuvo and Uplay).

 

[THE URANUS SPOTTER]

one day
eventually

do we have any cold, scientific data or is it just all guesswork? ((((((((((