As if it'd be better run by private interests in the US 😂
The letter was sent on January 22 and suggests the debt-financed $55 billion acquisition, which will purportedly result in PIF holding a 93.4 percent stake in the Battlefield and Apex Legends publisher, will incentive layoffs, offshoring, studio closures, and other cost-cutting measures.
"incentive"
Also, isn't this what yanks have been doing for decades? Don't seppo businesses regularly fire a bunch of employees before the end of the financial year to have "record-breaking fourth quarter" and then hire back a bunch of people? Painting the Saudis as worse capitalists than the USAians is just hilarious
Their concern isn’t that people are getting laid off but that they’ll be laid off here and replaced with people abroad; and the executives benefiting from the cost-cutting are no longer Americans in this case.
I think it's really only the latter: if rich yanks benefit = good, if non-yanks benefit = bad. They don't give two shits about USAians non in the C-suite being laid off. They haven't since the beginning and won't start now.
sauds are worse capitalists, but only in the sense that they regularly waste shitloads of $ on stupid shit in a last dotch effort to diversify themselves for the inevitable drying up of oil.
the US has been intertwining themselves with the UAE for decades as a part of their divide and conquer plan for the ME (which israel is a key part). the West does not want a unified ME, propping up the greedy predictable capitalist Sauds acts as easy source of power projection to keep rest of the area from unifying
Nothing will come of this unless it also concerns Republicans, but it doesn’t, because the President’s son-in-law helped make this deal happen and personally benefited from it.
I love it even more when they force their employees to return to office work, nothing makes me happier as a gamer than knowing the people making the games I love are miserable and the company has a much narrower hiring pool.
“We know people don’t like how poorly we treat our employees, so we’ve laid off as many as we thought we could get away with to reduce the overall number of people’s lives we make more miserable. We’re the good guys here.”
Classic publicly traded company using “reorganisation” (read: layoffs) to trick shareholders into thinking they are turning things around by simultaneously reducing costs and shifting blame for past failures of leadership.
The next step is a super safe release, like a remaster of one of their top selling games, followed by an announcement of a new entry in one of their most popular series. Line goes up. Ubisoft is back! Hire more developers, open a new studio (or buy an established studio), resume enshittifying. Rinse and repeat.
Yeah that company is cooked. They likely won’t last another decade and are going to make moves to look enticing for a buyout and pad the CEOs golden parachute. Fuck them and their millionaire management who are disconnected from reality and destroyed the careers of many creative people they fired under their feet.
I guarantee private equity is circling them like a flock of buzzards smelling death. This is why they’re preemptively making the same actions that a private equity company would do after acquisition, layoffs, restructuring “bold new plans” and a bunch of lip-service to inflate value before divvying up any resources of value like licenses and senior programmers to form a new brand, and throwing the rest away.
I’m actually cool with this. They really have been ignoring a large swath of Tom Clancy shit, and I feel assassin’s Creed just isn’t as cool and interesting as it used to be. Not to mention Prince of Persia which they seem to have completely abandoned. I would love it if private equity came in and sold all their ips to other houses.
Ubisoft founder and CEO, Yves Guillemot, said the company must pursue a “radically new” value-creation model and become a more “gamer-centric” organization to find its footing in an increasingly competitive and selective triple-A market.
Good! Realizing it needs to be about the gamer again not just shareholder value.
“The new operating model will further empower the execution of the Group’s strategy, centered on Open World Adventures and GaaS-native experiences, supported by targeted investments, deeper specialization, and cutting-edge technology, including accelerated investments behind player-facing Generative AI,” reads the document.
“The new operating model will further empower the execution of the Group’s strategy, centered on Open World Adventures and GaaS-native experiences, supported by targeted investments, deeper specialization, and cutting-edge technology, including accelerated investments behind player-facing Generative AI,” reads the document.
I can’t 😂😂😂 This is so funny, OMG… I swear I’d retire if my job is to write comedy. There’s no topping this shit… it’s like an absurdist Tim and Eric sketch 😂
I honestly don’t know how they’re so disconnected from reality. To in the same statement within 2 paragraphs say they both want to be more focused on the gamer, and immediately then say “More GenAI, more recurring payments, more Games as a Service”. I just, I don’t know man. I don’t want layoffs but man they really just don’t get it do they?
Yeah so, we know gamers have hated our stuff because of these horrible shitty practices - but, and hear me out, what if we did that stuff even more, don’t even mention things like great stories and fun worlds or anything gamers have been asking for, and also laid off most of our staff and forced return to office too?
They do want to be more focused on the gamer. That is, more focused on how to extract as much money from gamers as possible with as little work on their end as they can get away with.
This would collapse the company instantly. They need to make sure a good followup is available. Because most are not and are even worse, either through greed or incompetence. And yes, it could be way worse than current leaders. Because if it was that easy to just fire them and replace them randomly with anyone and hope it does better, I am sure every company did that.
CEOs are extremely replacable. The one thing that differentiates a good CEO from a bad one is how much they STFU and let the actual workers do their job instead of shoving directives down everyones’ throat every time a shiny new waste of an ‘investment’ catches their eye like AI.
Not all CEOs are equally good or bad. Some help the company to be better, others are better at ruining it. Replaceable does not mean that ANYONE can do the job. You completely ignored my point.
So you’re saying Ubisoft execs aren’t inept morons seeking the latest money-grubbing trends?
I hate to break it to you, but yes: Anyone can replace that kind of executive.
Could a random Joe replace the “executive” in a five man team? Probably not. Though any other scenario, it becomes more and more plausible. The bigger a company gets, the less competent the suits are. It’s basically a law of capitalism these days.
I don’t think they’re talking about Ubi specifically. I agree that CEOs are “easily” replaceable but I also agree that some people would do a better job than others
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne