Not to my knowledge, but I bet not being on Steam had more to do with it than Denuvo, by far. There is no indication that DRM software discourages sales, to my knowledge. If it does, at worst it breaks even.
I will buy the DRM-free option every time, but every piece of data out there suggests that "I will never play a game with Denuvo" people vastly overestimate how much of a practical impact that stance has.
Me, I'm just weirded out that people are so mad about some solutions they know but not about Steam DRM or any other solution that isn't known widely by name. You know, since I'm sharing all my unpopular gaming hot takes here.
Yeah, so I just checked, it brings up a Ubisoft Connect windows and then boots. It has less of a launcher than, say, Baldur's Gate 3.
I don't know if it makes you log in the first time or it creates a new thing for you by default, but I can tell you I had more account and launcher trouble running Warframe on a new PC this week than I did playing any recent Ubisoft game.
BTW, you can link up your Steam account to Warframe now and not have to log in each time and man, that only took a decade. Still didn't piss people off as much as Ubisoft being on Epic, though.
Yeah, I fully agree that they've stuck to a template far too closely for far too long. That's part of why I'm frustrated that this one went as poorly as it did, since it very much isn't that.
I think the hostility to any non-Steam platform is unwarranted, although annoyance is annoyance. That said, the Ubi launcher on Steam right now is just a pop-up, I don't think it makes you log in each time if you have everything linked.
This doesn't have anticheat, it has DRM software, though.
But hey, if there is no overlap, then how come this did so much worse than other similarly well liked metroidvanias, right? That's been my point here. People keep pointing out that it's not comparable to other Ubi titles. I disagree, because PoP is PoP, but let's roll with that. It also underperformed compared to other games in the same genre with similar review scores.
So what happened there? Either the Ubi woes are behind this, and then it doesn't make sense because this did worse than other more Ubisofty Ubisoft games, or they are not because different demos, and that doesn't make sense because this did much worse than similar games not from Ubisoft.
I think as far as this tells us anything is that the stink of negativity is not very fact-based when it comes to the core gaming community. That and Ubisoft may not have more money to make by going to middle sized, pure and simple high quality experiences like Rayman or this. Which sucks. Those are the best games they've made in recent years, as far as I'm concerned.
The point here isn't whether this game did poorly. It did. Cool.
The point here is that it did WORSE than other Ubisoft games.
Specifically, worse than Ubisoft games that include all the shitty behavior. More of the shitty behavior, in fact.
So the performance of the game is not correlated to the shitty behavior. Well, maybe more shitty behavior gets you better sales, that would fit, but I'm not going to jump to that.
You'd think if Ubisoft's shitty behavior is scaring people off this game would have done better than Mirage and Mirage better than Outcasts, but that's the opposite of what happened.
I get that you want that to be true, but there is really no indication that this is the case. There are a lot of elements in Ubisoft's recent issues, but there is no good suggestion that any of that train of thought lines up with what we're seeing here.
More to the point, even if it was, all that suggests for Ubi as a course of action is to keep doing what they're doing. I mean, maybe launch on Steam day one, but... yeah, if you monetize the big games better and the fans of the small games won't cut you a break for making them... just don't make them.
Okay, but there was none of that here (except perhaps the launcher), and there was no suggestion in the results that anybody wants to encourage that. So that's definitely not the lesson being learned here.
Also, and I will keep repeating this forever, companies don't make games, people make games.
Also, also, good luck with that. Don't look now, but that's not how major companies going out of business and fire-selling their IPs tends to go.
Look, I'm not sure why it's Ubisoft's turn in the hot seat after EA and Activision, but none of that is a productive outlook or leads to a better outcome, as this one really good, really wholesome game bombing hard goes to show.
I don't know the guy, but all of that sounds reasonable to me.
BG3 can be replicated, if you have a massive dormant IP that is part of a furiously resurgent franchise and have several hundred million dollars to burn in a years-long development cycle by a studio that has already done pretty much the exact same thing without a license successfully twice.
I wouldn't model my business on aligning that set of circumstances, but I sure am glad Larian did.
To be clear, there's a bunch of other AAA stuff that is also doing quite well with pretty clean, finished games. But for midsize stuff like PoP... woof, yeah, it's so hard to break through.
And you're right, it's a miserable set of incentives that if you launch broken you kinda have a built-in marketing hit because suddenly you're doing live support and adding features. No Man's Sky was a fun one for that. Cyberpunk. But those games did great at launch, so they had the built-in base to keep growing while they fixed the game. PoP launched pretty clean, was small and nobody cared, so it's no wonder Ubi has decided it can make those super talented devs do stuff on the next massive AssCreed or whatever is left of Beyond Good and Evil 2 or The Division or whatever.
So, one, I'm pretty sure in most cases that's not why, for the same reasons we all shared memes of people "boycotting Call of Duty" while appearing online playing Call of Duty.
But even taking everyone at their word, I'm saying the group as a whole is not working by those parameters. Directly, demonstrably in apples to apples comparisons they didn't buy the Ubisoft game that doesn't do the stuff people claim to be mad about and bought other Ubisoft games in larger numbers.
The thing with obstinance is that it's hard to make reality change its mind. Remarkably stubborn, reality.
Right. So you didn't make a difference here, since that's also true of all the Ubi games that did better than this, then.
But this doesn't have any of the other crap people are blaming for Ubi doing poorly. So you'd expect if the outrage was making a dent whatsoever their one game that is relatively clean of that stuff would have done better, not worse, than the other stuff they are putting out.
But nope, the opposite is true.
So hey, not saying you're lying, but I think the collective at least looked at the nice, small 2D metroidvania with no MTX and went "nah", but they were much more willing to give the GaaS-y stuff a try.
Although if I WAS saying you're not being all the way honest, I may guess that you just weren't on board for this anyway and now are performatively feigning outrage for something else after the fact to pretend other people's motivations are aligned with your opinions. But I'm not. So we're good.
Yeah, no, I understood it. I'm saying that there are similar 2d platformers on those same platforms (look, it's not my fault language recycles words for things) that did much, much better.
Hah. Did you hear about Concord before or after it left a crater visible from space?
In any case, there are two of them, in fact, and they're both good. You may be in time to help save The Rogue Prince of Persia, which is doing even worse, but if you don't mess with Early Access, Lost Crown is still up for sale and it's pretty great.
Well, it's the same crowd that plays a bunch of games that did better. The game is on the same platforms, Ubisoft or not. And all their GaaS games did much, much better on those same platforms, so yeah, it absolutely takes away from their complaints.
Outlaws may have been a bit of a disappointment and Mirage may have struggled, but Mirage had 5x the player count on its Steam relaunch than Lost Crown did. People want AssCreed and they're gonna get AssCreed forever.