Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.
There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.
But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.
The game they killed 3 days after release might have been good but i haven’t seen a single gameplay video or have any idea of what the game was about. Are they that scared of releasing a shit game and keeping it playable but dead for a while?
I mean, they spent what 400 millions on developing it and they won’t spend 10k - 100k to keep that game running for a while? Like “NO NOT A SINGLE CENT MORE SPENT ON THAT SHIT GAME!” XD
Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.
I don’t know what the market at large wants, but I suspect its failure is based at least in part on the fact that the purchase has zero value if other people don’t also value it, so the customer is now more reserved with their time and money unless a game seems like it’s going to take off, which would theoretically make nearly every a game a huge success or total failure. What I want is for a scalable multiplayer shooter that gracefully handles 1-X players, and I hardly care what X is as long as it’s more than 3. Let me host it on a LAN and play split-screen, and give me a deathmatch mode, among other things. We used to get this kind of shooter all the time, and now I’m starving for one, to the point that I’d happily have picked up Concord if it was that game, even with its wonky-ass character designs.
I played a dead MMO where i was the only person in the game. They where shutting down the servers soon and it was an interesting experience. The game wasn’t bad honestly. As a single player experience at least. Maybe that was the issue.
It had matchmaking so if there weren’t enough players it would take a long time and you’d end up in the same lobbies with the same players every time, if you could even get in apparently. Not like you could play solo even if you wanted to.
Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.
Yes, they’re a publisher. They supposedly have/had a small team working on a Blade Runner game, but they have yet to release a game they developed on their own. Publishing is their thing, so Annapurna Interactive is kinda fucked. I mean, jeez, it looks bad, I mean they all walked out.
This isn’t a problem. For the first time in a very long time, I actually have a queue of games I want to play and din’t just mindlessly scroll steam store or wait for big releases. In fact, I no longer follow game releases, there is something at any given time I can find to play
Statistically, if more than half of a random sample of steam games are rated to be good, the standards for evaluation are shit.
And the people that were supposed to let us know if a game is good or not, the “professionals”, have a median score around ~75% according to open critic data, otherwise they wouldn’t have a job because sponsors would gfo.
We’re on our own shifting through a pile of de facto shovelware to find anything of worth nowadays.
It’s a problem not exclusive to games, mind you. Music, scientific publishing and other content for profit industries have the exact same issue: Vetting quality requires work so for profit institutions offload the vetting to the user.
The things getting reviewed already have a selection bias that makes them more likely to review well. It’s not a problem that reviewers focus their time on the games that their audience is most interested in, as opposed to reviewing every asset flip published to Steam.
I’m sure Kane and Lynch are audience favorites. No reason not to think only the best games get reviewed and thus, shifting the mean 25% in the favor of the companies that just so happen to be the ones paying for advertising. It’s more likely outlets, on average, only review good games, that sounds more reasonable.
It does shift review coverage, generally, toward the ones with the most advertising. Kane & Lynch is a weird one to pull out to support your argument, because despite the advertising, they got fairly poor reviews. (Also, as someone who’s played Kane & Lynch, those games are underrated.) The games with the big advertising budgets typically have a degree of confidence behind that spend, which again creates selection bias toward games more likely to review well, but that doesn’t mean that Redfall and Suicide Squad still can’t happen and review poorly.
It does shift review coverage, generally, toward the ones with the most advertising
but that doesn’t mean that Redfall and Suicide Squad still can’t happen and review poorly
Thank you for arguing in my favour. Both Redfall and Suicide Squad reviewed well above 50%. For people on Lemmy arguing about statistics it’s obvious the mean is shifted so anything around 75% is mediocre, however, to the average consumer, that is not the case. Furthermore, I mentioned Kane and Lynch because that game was the reason giant bomb exists and everyone nowadays knows big publishers strong-arm outlets.
Above 50%, but do you have any idea how much lower the bar can be for a bad video game than Redfall and Suicide Squad? Those are the games that typically aren’t getting coverage. Redfall and Suicide Squad, again, had some confidence behind them. When that much money is thrown behind a game and there’s no confidence in it, it usually doesn’t even come out.
I haven’t finished half of my backlog because I’m mainly playing Fallout 76 and No Man’s Sky. I don’t have time to play every game I want just like I do not have time to watch every show on TV.
And these fuckers were trying to “celebrate” the Rare anniversary on social media recently like they didn’t just cancel Perfect Dark and have done nothing with any of the other properties in years.
I still have so many games I’ve picked up on Steam sales that I’ll happily wait for those $80 games to go on sale while going through my back catalogue
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