Ubisoft needs to get comfortoble with not owning their company
Ubisoft is clearly a tone-deaf company. But that doesn’t change that this comment has been frequently cited in some very out-of-context ways.
For those who don’t know, the not-owning games comment was in reply to an investor asking why people were reticent to try out Ubisoft+, their monthly service that lets people play pretty much all their games. He was suggesting many people are not used to the option of mass rental as opposed to ownership. But, many Game Pass subscribers (at least before their price increase) can attest that when the value proposition is good enough, it is an appealing option, wherein you accept impermanent access to get more games. In that sense, he was right.
So far as I can see, the intent of the comment had nothing to do with people who buy “lifetime” copies of their games. There’s separate criticisms to make about poor online implementations leading games like The Crew to be yoinked, and I’m in favor of that regulation. But Ubisoft is hardly alone in the way they’ve mishandled that, and the quote had nothing to do with it. I feel like most people pointing to it have only a vague idea of what corporate greed it represents, as though CEOs just want a way to delete your library and somehow make money from it.
The opinion isn’t even incorrect. I have the XBOX game pass and the value is pretty great for pc users.
I usually pick up a game and play a while then drop it when I get bored, so having a lot of options is great.
Ubisoft Execs Need To Get Comfortable With “Not Owning My Money”.
A lot of company’s should prepare for that, been running out of money for overpriced entertainment related stuff.
It used to be affordable so i had no issues with it, but now even the basics are overpriced.
I took their advice and got comfortable not owning Ubisoft games.
They make it so easy: anything they release I’ve already played years ago already.
i quit after AC4. kept up with the news and reviews, seems I never really missed anything good.
I stopped buying games that require online login. It’s a real pain in the ass when I’m traveling and offline. I stopped buying anything from Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar. They made their choice, so I did too.
I hate that Halo:MCC requires my like, 28 digit Microsoft password AND 2FA to play a game from 2007. It should allow you to bypass login and just play as your steam account.
Every time I want to play it, it asks for that, and I just quit and play something that is far less of a hassle, particularly offline.
Hey I have a real easy solution to that.
I’m perma banned because I had the gall to play modded MCC from the steam workshop on the day it released, before the moderation team knew modding was legal. I can’t even log into Halo waypoint to get help from the Halo team.
I now can’t play any Microsoft game, own an Xbox, or use game pass and I refuse to make a new account on principle.
This bugs the hell out of me too. I don’t think I’ve even started it yet for this very reason.
When did we get to the point where a Lemmy post got 1000+ upvotes?
As someone who posts a lot, here’s my general scale for Lemmy posts by upvotes:
0-99: Niche or a joke that only sort of landed
100-250: Average
250-400: Good post
500-999: GREAT post
1000+ : Hit post!
It’s been that way for a while now, but I don’t remember when I first noticed it.
Please die, please die, please die, please die
I know people working there, in towns where little other opportunities for such jobs exist. I… really don’t fancy the prospect of Ubisoft going bankrupt.
I know people who work there that used to steal my parking spot with their baby Blue Ford Mustang, on a residential street two blocks from the Ubisoft building. They can all go away.
Gamers say that Ubisoft execs need to get comfortable with not being solvent.
I’m afraid Ubisoft execs won’t feel much from that.
Ubisoft execs need to get comfortable flying coach.
If only bankruptcy actually meant consequences for those responsible.
Pretty much. The leadership team all have a golden parachute and will be integrated back into an industry and fuck that up too.
It’s a shame that they don’t have a literal golden parachute.
I sentence the investors and executives to lives of extreme luxury
Maybe they should just have fewer avocado toasts for a while?
And nothing of value will be lost.
You’re right Ubisoft, I am pretty comfortable not owning your games 🥰
They ran Ass cRee into the ground and launched Uplay with privacy violations.
I boycotted them after thinking they were one of the few good AAA companies.
Now they’re going to die.
Great. Maybe a better studio can reboot Ass cRee and make it wothwhile. Or you know, just leave it the fuck alone.
Same with Far Cry which is a shame because it used to be a really fun dumbshooter series. I got FC6 on sale last month and had to slog through it, I swore off the franchise after finishing the game and haven’t touched it since, even though there’s plenty of post-game content left for me.
Far Cry 6 made some decisions that didn’t make sense to me. I was always running out of ammo, which is something you shouldn’t have to worry about in a Far Cry game. Having essentially just 4 magazines doesn’t go far in a protracted firefight, and the Supremo is inconsistent to use. In Far Cry 5, the amount of ammo you could carry was roughly double the amount.
You could also change your weapons at any time through the menu (so you’re essentially carrying like 50 weapons) but you can’t change your ammo type unless you’re at a workbench (although I think they fixed this later on), which is the opposite of the previous games.
The game map is nice and large but it suffers from generic Point of Interest syndrome that is common in Ubisoft games.
At least the plot was zany at times, particularly the side missions.
Sad to see our resident AAAA game developer not doing well, but it was largely of their own making here.
I haven’t played FC5 nor 6, but the running out of ammo really feels like FC2. Having to scavenge for weapons in the middle of fights or using mounted guns and grenades to kill enemies. Wich I think really improves the game, but it could not be as good in these other releases.
FC2 is the only good Farcry as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not a fan of the current trend of remakes, but a re-release of Far Cry 2 might be the only thing Ubisoft could make that I’d still be interested in.
The degrading weapons, fire physics, and stealth* were leagues better than anything in the later games. If they fixed the instant enemy respawning, added more fast travel stations, and toned down the OP DLC guns that made scavenging weapons pointless it’d be a nearly perfect game.
* YMMV. It had “fire from the brush and reposition while the enemy searches for you” stealth rather than the “crouch behind someone and you’re completely invisible” stealth of later games. I liked it but a lot of people hated FC2’s stealth gameplay.
gets attacked by a huge eagle and drops to low health
Heals himself by removing a bullet from of his arm
I like 3 and 4 too. But I agree, they hit really differently
Well you can’t pick up enemy’s weapons for one. Running out of ammo just means going to the loadout menu and selecting a different weapon
The enemies don’t drop their weapons?
Guess I’ll stick to the older ones
At least the plot was zany at times, particularly the side missions.
The main plot was abysmal though. What the fuck was that ending, the kid was just irrelevant.
4 and 5 had better endings even if they were kind of depressing
If you want a stupid fun “kill infinite number of baddies working for an insane BBEG” style game, Just Cause is a blast. 2 and 3 were both fantastic (3 smartly gave you infinite explosives) and the amount of silly chaos you can cause (and are rewarded for causing too!) is brilliant.
For an example, in JC2 there’s a mission where you have to destroy a rocket which is launching using a fighter jet and blow up the rocket before it reaches orbit. The ongoing challenge was simply that I’d shoot it until I got too close, not start maneuvering for a second pass until it was too late and instead crash into the rocket dying in a fiery explosion, followed by the rebel leader telling me over the radio that I’d failed and to try again. Then one of the time, I shot the rocket until I got too close, started maneuvering too late, exploded as the plane crashed into the rocket and the rebel leader started saying something over the radio, except it was a congratulatory statement, and I realized I’d instinctively ejected from the plane at impact, and was now falling down to the ground with only my parachute and lots of enemy aircraft trying to kill me. So I grappled to a helicopter, persuaded the crew to let me in (aka beat them up and threw them out) then got shot to hell by another helicopter, which I conveniently would grapple to, persuade its crew to let me in, and keep repeating the process until I finally was close enough to the ground to grapple down to the ground and steal a fast car to evade the enemy army.
JC3 one-ups this by instead of having you blow up a rocket (an ICBM in this case) but instead catch up to and ride the ICBM so you can redirect it to save a major city.
Im honnestly impressed by how much of a slog FC6 was. God at launch the people delivering your cars were so painfully slow everyone just resorted to shooting the driver once they showed up. I don’t even know if they’ve fixed that.
I didn’t play it at launch but can attest that I was just shooting the delivery driver because it took so long for him to get out
It was even better than that in my opinion once. FC1 and 2 were fairly intelligent, capable, and innovative shooters. FC3 was dumb fun, but importantly sold ridiculously well so they decided that’s all it would ever be and that gets stale fast.
Honestly, it wasn’t even Assassin’s Creed anymore, it was more like Warrior’s Creed starting from Odyssey to Valhalla, and then they backtracked to more assassin like gameplay with Mirage. I stopped buying their games when I realized how bad Far Cry 5 and Odyssey were.
I like the concept of Origins and Odyssey (I only played some of Odyssey and haven’t cared about AC in ages). You’re right that it shouldn’t have been an AC game though. They could have set it in the same universe and just called it something else, but we can’t have new IPs. Honestly, if they wanted to do the same thing but make more sense for the gameplay, I think you playing a Templar would have been an interesting way to do it. I don’t remember much of the lore, but that seems like it’d work.
I got a lot of early Assassins Creed vibes from Ghost of Tsushima.
It’s the best AC game in years. I can’t wait for the next one.
Yeah but… You do get that you don’t own any of your games on Steam, Epic, whatever either?
Just GOG is DRM free.itch.io as well
Id just like to point out when you read the full article the context is different than the headline as usual. But regardless Ubisoft deserves their demise.
steam can be DRM free as well but it depends on the game to use or not the Steam API for license…
Any Steam game that doesn’t also use extra DRM can be cracked, too.
You’re not wrong, but Ubisoft were absolutely tone deaf for saying that.
I find it fascinating that they’re supposedly going bankrupt.
Aren’t they… big? Don’t they have tons of assets? Shouldn’t they be, still, sitting on a pile of cash?
This article is from That Park Place, a right-wing website, so I’d take it with a grain of salt. It’s coming from “anti-woke” people who salivate over the idea of “go woke, go broke.”
Big assets also means Big liabilities.
1bn of short term and 2bn of long term debt.
“Company fails to generate infinite revenue even after implementing every abusive tactic known”.
More like, company keeps pushing for short-term profits, runs out of goodwill built up in the past.
Ubisoft had many long standing issues, but disowning The Crew users was the worst possible move they could have made in their already dire situation.
I played and enjoyed both of them, shutting down the first one instead of giving it offline functionality really pissed me off and was the final straw for me with Ubi. It had a fully offline playable story, NPC vehicles to race etc. and the game would’ve been preserved forever.
Instead we got the crew 2, always online AAA signature garbage.
I want to say the same thing…
But then you have like every other corporation on earth doing the same, and most of them see their stock price soar.
Imagine, about five years ago, they peaked at $82.
It was also during that time when they talked about getting into Crypto, NFTs, and all sorts of other get rich quick schemes.
Now look at them.