Its sad that a star wars game can be forgotten about. Jedi fallen order had a gimmick (soulslike deflecting). Battlefield had its multiplayer. Outlaws had… Far cry? Hitman? I dont know…
Bit of a yikes for the last three games the studio worked on to be AC Shadows, Star Wars Outlaws, and Skull & Bones. Two of those proved to be monumental failures in terms of sales expectations, and Shadows still being too new to know for sure, but its not looking good.
I haven’t seen confirmation that this is what Ubisoft has been doing, but given how many studios they have and how quickly they turn games around, it wouldn’t surprise me if they used the “chase the sun” method of development, where as one team signs off, they hand development over to the next team, where it’s morning, and their work day is just starting. So it would just be very likely that every Ubisoft studio touches many games that Ubisoft works on. From the credits on their games, this is certainly what it appears to be. This is the same development method that Larian used to make a game as large as Baldur’s Gate 3 in only 6 years.
My first reaction was to say that “follow the sun” (this is the actual term used in interviews as far as I can tell) can’t really improve production throughput any more than having multiple studios in the same country. But when you think about it having playtesters on an opposite timezone is pretty useful. And I’m sure you can set up some other sequential pipelines as well. I imagine it only works when the process is very streamlined though.
Shadows is honestly the most fun i’ve had with an AC game in the longest time. The stealth is so much fun to pull of, it makes me feel like i’m back in Unity
Yeah, I’m loving Shadows so far (only about 8 hours into it) but it’s the most fun I’ve had in a Ubisoft game in a long time. Last title I played was Far Cry 6, it just felt so bland and never ended up completing it.
The industry is full of dead studios that made good games. Marketing does work and is necessary, but I’m not sure much you can say this marketing campaign was successful given the heavy lifting Assassin’s Creed as a brand was already doing.
Really good games flopped before because they weren’t marketed well. Marketing is budgeted for productions of any size, and influencer marketing in general is very effective for something like videogames. Larger amounts were spent on TV ads, or printing campaigns.
I guess modern examples are Psychonauts or Prey (2017). Hundreds of games are released every week. There will be some gems, we’ll just never know. Among Us was one of those games before it got successfull by pure chance.
I really don’t think Ubisoft needs to advertise a new Assassins Creed game beyond a few ads here and there, and chatting with some journalists. Spending a ton of money to allow people to play it ahead of time on stream just dilutes the experience for anyone that intends on buying the game.
Seriously, the last thing I want is for the start of a new game to be spoiled for me by some streamer.
Given the vitriol against Ubisoft (I’m not commenting on how justified it is), obviously they need to do something to counter it. The anti-woke crowd are an incredibly noisy minority.
So they spent advertising money on freelance shills. Ok, that is just another form of advertising like paying an advertising company to do advertising.
Yes, someone who promotes a product while hiding the fact that they’ve been paid to promote the product. Streamers generally say “this is a sponsored stream” to avoid lawsuits.
If someone starts off saying “this is a sponsores stream” then yes, that is correct. It’s illegal to not disclose when media is an advertisement in most of the world. I’m pretty sure it’s against the TOS of most streaming sites, too.
Well I’ve certainly never heard that before and that’s not what the definition of the word is from what I’m seeing but I guess I can understand using that as a distinction.
A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps or gives credibility to a person or organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with said person or organization, or have been paid to do so.
Shill has primarily been used as an insult for the past 50 years in the way I’m defining it here. I don’t believe you’ve never heard it used to mean that.
one who acts as a decoy (as for a pitchman or gambler)
Literally on that same page.
a person who poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating, as at a gambling house, auction, confidence game, etc.
I think everything you quoted there would accurately describe influencers being paid to play a game. As to whether you believe me or not, don’t really care. Why you keep digging this hole for no reason whatsoever seems rather odd to me, as does being so unnecessarily hostile for no reason. Have a good one.
There are some confused people in the comments, it’s industry standard to sponsor streams/have brand collaboration/twitch drops. Every company does it, and 2 million dollars is not much at all. their advertising budget is at least 20x that much, probably more.
This is true, but one thing I noticed with AC Shadows is that there were a LOT of no-name streamers posting reels with fake hype over the game. It was a little egregious and came off as more than a little desperate.
My buddy is a little streamer (gets maybe a few dozen viewers) and he got early access to it as well. Although he doesn’t add any fake hype, he’s just a very good hype man.
Without seeing what you’ve seen, that honestly sounds more like a symptom of the platform, current internet trends, and algorithm gaming than it sounds like a cheesy viral marketing campaign
Or just excitement at getting “exclusive” early access as a small streamer. If you don’t know there are thousands of others, it’d feel like an opportunity to make it big.
Generally speaking, algorithms on these sites don’t serve me a ton of videos with no views from creators with no followers, en masse. With AC shadows, I was suddenly inundated with these videos, on multiple sites, without ever having looked anything up about it, exclusively by streamers that nobody is watching.
I just wish companies would stop releasing games to streamers only. It does nothing but piss me off when I see someone playing a game, find it interesting then find out it doesn’t even exist to buy yet … no demos, no test play versions no nothing…just coming soon.
I know it’s cool to hate on this game, especially with it being so mediocre, but to me the number is fairly meaningless by itself. I wonder how that 2 million budget compares to other large releases ( say Starfield, since it’s pretty clear that bethesda also pumped a lot of money into the “gaming press”)
I haven’t found a source for this number when I looked for it. The best I got was a finance blog saying “experts say” without saying that they were progenitors of the reporting or not. Valhalla had a budget about half of this, so it would surprise me if Shadows was that much more expensive.
No wonder I never played anything on Roblox - it’s for kids. I feel like parents have a lot of blame to shoulder in this case too. They should be preparing their kids for these situations, but seemingly thousands fail.
You should see how excited some kids are about Roblox. I used to work in public schools around like 2017, and even then I met kids who were OBSESSED.
And I think you’re 100% right - parents are responsible for this just as much as Roblox themselves. But the point is that Roblox could absolutely be doing more.
I mean, an open and seemingly poorly censored market place of assets and “experiences” targetted at children sounds like a recipe for disaster to begin with. Many parents aren’t technologically adept enough to look past the website, seeing it’s marketed at children and going “must be fine”.
This isn’t a defence, but the world gets more and more complicated every day and people are just asked to deal with it… Seems like many governments have just given up trying to regulate anything, and therefore there’s no incentive for trash companies like Roblox to put in any protections.
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