This one also got dinged in reviews for technical performance issues, and there were some changes they made to the art direction, so this isn’t strictly speaking a “better” version of that game.

Private companies are just as capable of making bad decisions as public ones. You just hear about them less due to scale. The same people will still be in charge at Ubisoft if this happens, and they’re used to making money a certain way. This move would just be to prevent someone else from taking over the company.

If you’re a public company and want to go private, you have to offer a buyback price for the outstanding shares, yes. It’s easier to do when the stock is low. Or you can blow a fortune on it like Musk buying Twitter.

SBI is just writing work for hire. When game dev cycles get longer, you don’t need writers for the full length of it, and contract work makes more sense. The “criticism” is little more than conspiracy theory, especially since SBI’s contributions aren’t exactly itemized.

That’s their opportunity to go private for cheap. But if they do, I doubt that results in them realizing what they’ve done wrong.

They spent all their time and money putting their eggs in so few baskets that I doubt they could survive even a handful of flops. If they survived long enough to pivot, that would be a-okay by me, but I doubt that timeline exists.

I listen to Jeff Grubb’s daily news podcast, and when some toxicity came up around Ubisoft recently, he mentioned that maybe not everyone feels that way, but they don’t have anyone who feels so positively about Ubisoft that they’re about to jump to their defense either, and I think that tracks. Me, personally: Is it worth openly hating and spewing vitriol at Ubisoft? No. Do I hope they fail? Yes. Do I realize how many people would be out of a job as a result? Yes. Do I feel good about that? No. Do I want products that I perceive as “bad” to succeed in the market? No. Similarly, it sucks that the talented folks at Crystal Dynamics were set to work on Avengers and that the talented folks at Rocksteady were put to work on Suicide Squad, but I’m proud of the market for not supporting that garbage, and there are positive consequences to that that affect what gets made in the future.

It’s vague enough that it could be people complaining about DEI nonsense, which is stupid, but it could also be about anything from destroying good will with their fans to creating an industry that’s a house of cards responsible for the bubble bursting that we’ve witnessed for the past two years, and I could see game developers railing against their own if it’s for something they perceive to be destroying their industry. Like, this guy is a monetization director; I could absolutely see developers railing against manipulative monetization practices like loot boxes. But again, the statement is so vague and presented without context that it could be anything. The twitter account that linked it would absolutely be motivated to have people hound them about Yasuke and then say, “See?! They blame us innocent gamers for hate even though Ubisoft is obviously bad!”

Sorry, what’s SAO?

After investing in Nixxes, I doubt it.

You might want to root for Capcom’s REX engine licensing to take off then, because off the shelf AAA game engines are going to be much more necessary as time goes on. Then stuff like Godot for lower end games.

I had to check Wikipedia. It is 343 rebranded.

So this is a hiring drive for a studio that laid off half of its personnel about a year ago? For a series that lost its way a long time ago with no indication that it’ll get back on track?

This article sucks. The original quote could be talking about anything, because it’s so vague. It could be about legitimate criticisms of the game, or it could be nonsense like people yelling about Sweet Baby and DEI. There’s no way to know, but the author of the article would clearly like you to ascribe it to something rational that still makes Ubisoft the bad guy.

EDIT: Original tweet is from a MAGA guy, so it’s very easily actually about shitty people.

They’re competing with PC now and simultaneously trying to turn this into a vector to convert people to PS5. It won’t work, but the fact that there are PC versions at all show how they can’t just do what they want with impunity.

We’re in here talking about how big budget games are making the industry unsustainable, and after Infinite came and went without making a huge splash, you think the next one ought to be even bigger?

This is the kind of stuff you might know if you already know what’s ahead of you, like if you played it before, but as a first-time player of the game, not knowing what’s coming, I found it to be a poor experience when you only have a melee weapon but specced for guns.

I watch and listen to a lot of Giant Bomb and SkillUp, and both had praise for the multiplayer modes, warts and all. I can’t agree with all games media just being marketing, otherwise you’d never see bad reviews for the likes of those publishers spending all that money on marketing. It may not have worked for you, but doing all of those modes has done very well for the game.

It was also famous for having multiplayer modes that were just fun and didn’t ask you to commit your life to them. Some of those multiplayer modes were really cool.

They sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year. They’re easy to play, they look nice, and they have a lot of content for the money, so you can stretch your dollar.