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.”
The business logs how often you use the game. They use it as a metric of engagement. If everyone breaks their streak, their marketing department has a melt down.
No idea what that means, but I do know the devs of this game also made War for The Overworld and they did a fantastic job of making and maintaining it.
I’d highly recommend their studio… and if this is the type of game you’re interested in, you should definitely check it out!
I don’t know, I never saw it as a meme but rather just shorthand in cases where no other term existed that efficiently communicated the genre or style of a game.
Do you have a replacement term available for Souls-like that sums up what you can expect of a game within that genre using two words or less?
I saw another article describing something, perhaps this game, as a “Theme Hospital-like”. Theme Hospital-like is not a genre.
Souls-like is likely in a similar situation as Rogue-like or perhaps “Doom Clone” from back in the day, where a new genre is emerging and there isn’t yet an agreed-upon term for it. Rogue-like stuck around probably because it was such a niche game/genre for so long and people had been calling it that for maybe decades before the term went mainstream. Doom Clone died out because the genre branched out so much.
I wouldn’t necessarily want to reduce “Souls-like” to another genre, because it may very well be its own genre. It may end up “growing” a new name like First-Person Shooters did, or it may end up sticking around because “X-like” may be the new thing to do.
I’m just getting annoyed by seeing things like “Stardew Valley-like”, “Dragon Quest-like”, “Theme Hospital-like”…those tell you nothing if you don’t know the game they’re talking about, and if you DO know the game they’re talking about, you might get the wrong idea what the game is about because the author is making a bad comparison.
I do take your point and it’s a fair criticism. It can almost feel like a marketing ploy to piggyback off of the popularity of another game, such as Stardew Valley-like, considering a lot of the time those games have since developed a genre, like for FPS instead of Doom-like.
I would also add, though, that using Doom-like/Doom-lite would still be appropriate to define games that are closer to a Doom type game than your CoD or Counter Strike. You could make a similar argument for the style of play Stardew Valley offers compared to literally Farming Simulator 20XX.
But you could also argue it gives the reader/consumer a quicker understanding of what to expect from the game. Especially in the case of this article where there isn’t a way to clearly define/ label what to excpet from the game.
My dislike of it stems from the marketing ploy aspect. It feels like clickbait; authors trying to get hits from people looking up (or “interested in”) a certain game even if it may not be an accurate description.
I think the Doom-like FPS’s are getting called “Boomer Shooters” now, lol…but we’re ironically in a situation where we need a new term again. Or we would be if that genre were popular in the mainstream.
I think describing the game in the article as a “Management Sim inspired by Theme Hospital/Bullfrog” would get across the same concept, for example. I don’t think it’s difficult. I think it’s just becoming a popular thing for gaming journalists to do
I can see where you’re coming from and I agree at times it feels like it’s being used for the marketing since it’s easier to say, using the article as an example, “Bullfrog-like”. They could have taken an extra moment to be a bit more descriptive, such as with your example, and say “Management Sim inspired by Theme Hospital/Bullfrog”, for people who may not be familiar with “Theme Hospital” or a Bullfrog game.
Just to circle back to your initial comment, “I got to the word “Bullfroglike” and stopped reading”, I can definitely see where you are coming from, but I did disagree with your approach.
I also just wanted to add that I hope this isn’t taken as an attack upon yourself.
I do like the alliteration for “Boomer Shooter” but I don’t think it’s the right demographic xD. I think it’s still somewhat common, but I also don’t think it’s as mainstream as say your Battlefield or CoD.
We call them first-person shooters now. And I think they were usually called Doom-clones. But it makes sense that they’d use a word like that when a word for the genre hadn’t really been codified by that point.
Yeah, Rogue-like is a notable exception. The difference is that it’s an established term for a genre, whereas a single journalist saying something like “Theme Hospital-like” is not a genre.
whereas a single journalist saying something like “Theme Hospital-like” is not a genre.
Exactly. Which is why your comments here do not make any sense at all; they’re not saying it’s a genre. They’re saying these games are like the games of a long gone company of the past. There’s no established way of saying that other than “Bullfrog-like.”
But that’s their thing, they made war for the overworld because they were huge fans of bullfrog’s dungeon keeper and wanted a spiritual successor to it, now galacticare might be like bullfrog’s theme hospital
what is your art if it’s not engaging with the issues of the time? What is your art if you’re claiming that it’s not political? Because the point of art is to tell the truth, and you’re lying.
Say what? Are they referring to just a specific type of art, like political art?
Wow. I can’t count how many sites I’ve blocked from my newsreader because I was flooded with “How to find Rupees in Zelda” articles that are so basic as to be ridiculous. At the rate of 50 per week, that’s all you’ll get.
I actually do like guides like “How to find the secret underground vault and its 3 keys”, but I don’t want them in my news feed. I want them to be there when I search the site or Google.
Damn, Space Trucker looks like my jam! Honestly I love playing the space trucker in Elite Dangerous but the economy stuff is such a slog, finding out what to buy and sell where.
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