4mo ago

Baldur's Gate 3 publishing chief calls out Ubisoft's 'broken strategy': If gamers need to get used to not owning games, 'developers must get used to not having jobs'

www.pcgamer.com Baldur's Gate 3 publishing chief calls out Ubisoft's 'broken strategy': If gamers need to get used to not owning games, 'developers must get used to not having jobs'

Prince of Persia: The Lost Throne was a critical hit but didn't sell very well, and Michael Douse thinks that's entirely Ubisoft's fault.

Baldur's Gate 3 publishing chief calls out Ubisoft's 'broken strategy': If gamers need to get used to not owning games, 'developers must get used to not having jobs'

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4mo ago

Baldur's Gate 3 publishing chief calls out Ubisoft's 'broken strategy': If gamers need to get used to not owning games, 'developers must get used to not having jobs'

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/baldurs-gate-3-publishing-chief-calls-out-ubisofts-broken-strategy-if-gamers-need-to-get-used-to-not-owning-games-developers-must-get-used-to-not-having-jobs/

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16 comments

It seems like the AAA publishers don't know what to do with that type of mid-budget game that was the staple of the 2000s generation.
Spend a bit of money (not crazy much), make something fun with a bit of originality, and just put it out for sale. No complex monetisation strategy or pipeline to funnel people to subscriptions. We give you money, you give us game.
- The vampires working in the monetization and marketing department have to justify their jobs, they will continuously make shit up to milk the cash cow dry
  
  As long as we pay, they will keep grifting
- Seriously, I don't get it. If a project makes its budget back, it's a success. Maybe it would also be good if they didn't lay off so many developers between projects; for each project that pays for itself, even if it doesn't provide dump trucks of profit and value for shareholders, the developers still get the experience of another successful project under their belts and that talent can be nurtured into greater success for future projects.
  
  It's sounds like you ate Capt'n Crunch this morning, instead of a heaping bowl of Cap'italism.
  Our system rewards people who would kill babies in order to make 4% more than last quarter. Anything less than "even more profitable than last quarter" is a sin for which there is no penance.
- You don’t understand our entire society is shifting to an even greedier system to push a couple dimes extra at the cost of major quality. The enshittification era is coming or is already here.
  
  It's at least a century old problem imho. In the 1950's clever capitalists where already looking for ways of "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary". I can't believe how often I've had to buy a new fucking toaster. It just keeps getting worst.
  
  They do understand to a point. The people who were fans of the original Prince of Persia games have carried what has until very recently been something of a lackluster franchise. That they remained fans is important and speaks to the world they came from which wasn't subscription based.
  Either Ubisoft was hoping that they'd win those fans back with this game (and get new players invested as well), or they were hoping an entire new cohort of gamers from the newer generations would pick this game up (and the newer generations are into micro transactions but also find them to be divisive). That older cohort of gamers really really don't like micro transactions.
  Just because something bad has arrived doesn't mean that people will continue to put up with it.
- Companies aren't interested in making decent money from their decent product, or taking a risk on a unique idea these days. They're only interested in squeezing every last obscene penny out of consumers from their piss-poor, canned rehash of another product.
  
  The thing I don't get is, surely having two revenue sources is better than one?
- Yup. What's wild In particular is that they believe that games like Lost Crown have enough of a pull to convince people to use their store/launcher. That's something that even the big AAA releases struggle with. When you stubbornly try to do that with a mid-sized game, you might as well cancel your entire marketing budget.
  
  It something Nintendo excels at and it's weird they haven't tried it. Nintendo puts out dozens of mid range games a year that are solid with no weird monetization.
  You can't even blame the great sales on Nintendo having all these amazing IPs because they built most of those IPs from scratch WITH mid range games and the occasional AAA in the series. It's a long play but these business types are to busy looking at the quarterly number to start building now.

Of course it's the developers who take the hit, not the greedy executives who made such oppressive statements.

Ubisoft is not a serious game publisher, rather is a racketeering company that uses gaming software as a vehicle for its monetization schemes.
It's also a sex harassment and assault den for its upper management to prey on its clerical staff, and its HR notoriously covers for them.
I no longer play the Ubisoft games for which I have licenses, and I say this as an old fan of the Far Cry series. No longer.
Ubisoft needs to fail enough to get liquidated and bought out, I expect, by another AAA publisher gone amuck or a private equity management company. In either case, may Ubisoft assets load them down like a neutron star.

16 comments