Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.
Anyway here’s the article:
We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft’s XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die
By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.
The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a “perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat,” according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.
“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.
“Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game,” Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company’s official site. “Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition.”
This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.
The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:
“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”
If anything, this seems targeted to the less avid gaming enthusiasts who would be interested in playing some games, but couldn’t see themselves buying a console.
I used to find XCloud’s portability a nice thing, until they increased the subscription fees. To my knowledge, you can’t even get cloud access unless you get GP Ultimate.
Oh, and let’s not forget these are the people that fired the developers of GOTY Hi-Fi Rush.
M$ monopolizes swathes of the game industry (and several other computer related areas) while Sony monopolizes nearly everything else media related. This is NOT how market competition is supposed to happen.
BTW, Gotcha Gotcha Games is the owner of RPG Maker and Pixel Game Maker, make of that what you will.
Sony would essentially own the anime and manga industry and be able to dictate monetization practices as well as trends. I find that even more concerning than the Fromsoft acquisition and that’s saying something. Nothing good can come from this whatsoever.
Does Japan not have… like… an anti monopoly board. This is an insane merger to even consider. It would make an entity so large it could dominate multiple media industries.
So I guess Aftermath is the new Kotaku? Theyre hiring all the people that used to work there, and Kotaku didn’t exactly have the best reputation lately. I don’t see Aftermath’s angle where they think things will be better for them.
Aftermath was started by a bunch of people that left or were fired by Kotaku to start with (I don’t remember which), so it makes sense they would hire others who came from a similar situation
Gee, I wonder why it’s all AI generated horseshit from press releases these days.
The writing was on the wall when Jeff Gerstmann was fired over a bad review back in 2007. The whole game journalism industry has been on life support since then, and realistically been shafted ever since we went from purchased magazines to online.
Even then magazines would find themselves without timely review copies if they were not sympathetic to the need for good reviews.
It’s all about the money. When they give honest bad reviews they’ll end up not being invited to play early review copies, thus missing out and falling behind on the wave.
I think true journalism hardly exists anymore. Feels like most genuine reviews come from people that aren’t paid to do the reviews by either the site/magazine publisher they’re working for or the developer/publisher offering the game for review.
So many articles on big websites feel like they read entirely like AI-generated content. Some don’t even bother to hide it, they might just as well be old school RSS-feeds at this point.
Who would’ve thought that an industry that disregarded and actively attacked and insulted their viewer/reader base, who gained a fame for 10/10ing all games under the sun and folding to the most miniscule of complaints from pressure groups would end up not having viewers/readers at all ? Not to mention hiring people who hate video games, can’t play them and/or plagiarize footage from youtube to showcase the game as journalists.
Let me play the tiniest violin concerto for you guys. Now roll over and let youtubers take your industry.
you could repurpose this headline to literally any creative or journalistic industry these days. “x industry is being propped up by underpaid freelancers” is just a fact of life now. it’s just so much cheaper when you don’t owe them any benefits or dignity or anything at all in fact.
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