midian18

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Recap: To say that Ubisoft isn't having a good time right now would be an understatement. The French studio is reeling from the comparative failure of Star Wars Outlaws – a game it expected to be smash hit – and as a result has just delayed the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows by three months. The firm's shares are at a 10-year low, and investors are pushing the company to sell itself.

Ubisoft was banking on Star Wars Outlaws to be a massive, multi-platform hit that would earn the company plenty of money, especially with the expensive Gold and Ultimate editions and season pass.

Outlaws, as we know, failed to live up to expectations. Most reviews weren't that bad, but few called the game excellent. A large number of players were even less generous, slamming Outlaw's repetitiveness and many other flaws.

As a direct result of Outlaws' lukewarm reception, Ubisoft announced last week that it was delaying the release of the next Assassin's Creed entry, Shadows, to further polish and refine the game, something the company admitted was a result of "the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release." Ubisoft also confirmed that the Star Wars adventure had a "softer than expected launch."

Outlaws has sold a million copies in the month since it launched. For comparison, Assassin's Creed Mirage, which didn't exactly set the gaming world on fire, sold five million copies in three months.

Ubisoft has cut its guidance for the financial year, expecting bookings to fall to around 1.95 billion euros ($2.1 billion). It also expects net booking for the fiscal second quarter to be down to 350 million to 370 million euros ($387 million - $410 million) from its previously forecast 500 million euros ($554 million).

"The revised targets are mainly a reflection of decisions taken for Assassin's Creed Shadows and the softer than expected launch for Star Wars Outlaws," said Ubisoft, which is also scrapping plans to launch AC Shadows with a season pass.

Ubisoft's share price over the last five years

The situation has led to Ubisoft shares falling to a 10-year low. As reported by CNBC, AJ Investments, an activist investor with a less than 1% stake in Ubisoft, now says that it was working with other shareholders to push the company to sell itself to private equity firms or to Chinese gaming giant Tencent.

AJ Investments said in an open letter last week that it had gathered the support of 10% of Ubisoft shareholders for its pressure campaign. The investor is due to speak with Ubisoft management today to discuss its proposals. AJ Investments said it would demonstrate in front of Ubisoft's headquarters in Montreuil, Paris, if needed.

There are already fears that, like Outlaws, Shadows will fail to perform as well as Ubisoft expects – a trend that could continue with future releases, even with day-one Steam launches.

Ubisoft has never had the best reputation among gamers. It's been voted the most-hated gaming brand in the world more than once, and there are those who blame the Outlaws reception on trolls who target Ubisoft games and modern Star Wars media.

"The game received an unusual number of user reviews with a clear negative bias (including a large percentage of "zero" reviews), despite seeing acceptable review scores from reputable review sites," Wedbush analysts Michael Pachter, Alicia Reese and Kade Bar wrote in a note last week. "This is a case of a rare incel victory that led to Ubisoft having to take down its numbers," they added.

Some analysts point to sheer number of games available today, their high prices, and the cost of living crisis for a slowdown in the gaming market. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot himself admitted that gamers now expect extraordinary experiences, and that "delivering solid quality is no longer enough."

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Ubisoft investors push for company sale as shares hit decade-low

 
Blaming the incels? Whether these reviews are real or not, this is a form of protest and making people angry is not a good business model. I'm sure calling your player base "incels" isn't helping. Starwars has its own can of worms caused by Disney, I don't know why Disney thought going with ubisoft to make their game was a good idea.

The "incels" won, good, I hope they keep winning. I bet a DEI PR hire made that statement
 
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"delivering solid quality is no longer enough."

Is that meant to be a joke? Poor quality, incomplete, poorly written, rushed, unoptimized games are one of the primary reasons people no longer have faith Ubisoft. You know that whatever you buy is going to be a mess one way or another.

Not to mention, even a quality turd is still a turd. The games have to actually be fun as well.
 
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yRaz said:
Blaming the incels? Whether these reviews are real or not, this is a form of protest and making people angry is not a good business model. I'm sure calling your player base "incels" isn't helping. Starwars has its own can of worms caused by Disney, I don't know why Disney thought going with ubisoft to make their game was a good idea.

The "incels" won, good, I hope they keep winning. I bet a DEI PR hire made that statement
Click to expand...

No. It was Michael Pachter, a wedbush analyst and youtuber that is famous for being wrong with most of his predictions.
I don't think he has direct connections with Ubisoft. But what he did won't help Ubisoft getting more sales.

What is impressive is just how much the videogames industry has come to despise their consumer base.
The only industry that comes close is the film industry.
I can't even imagine a car company publicly insulting their consumer base. Or any other industry.
 
The bar never moved, Ubisoft just got too lazy to jump.
Their argument might hold water if their titles were objectively increasing in quality, but they aren't.
 
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winjer said:
What is impressive is just how much the videogames industry has come to despise their consumer base.
The only industry that comes close is the film industry.
I can't even imagine a car company publicly insulting their consumer base. Or any other industry.
Click to expand...
Well, there was the famous case of the founder of Ferrari insulting one of his customers so badly that said customer, who owned the Lamborghini tractor company, decided to create his own sports car company. And at least with games today there are some other studios who actually like their customer base, though you will often have to go outside of the US to find them. AC Shadows being moved to a Feb release means it will be going head to head with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and while they are not really the same genres, I know which historical game will be getting my money at that time.
 
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Dreadcthulhu said:
Well, there was the famous case of the founder of Ferrari insulting one of his customers so badly that said customer, who owned the Lamborghini tractor company, decided to create his own sports car company. And at least with games today there are some other studios who actually like their customer base, though you will often have to go outside of the US to find them. AC Shadows being moved to a Feb release means it will be going head to head with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and while they are not really the same genres, I know which historical game will be getting my money at that time.
Click to expand...

Yes, but that was a spat between 2 man.
I can't imagine a company like Ford, Renault, Fiat, etc, going public and saying that drivers are bastards for not buying their cars.
Or Coca-cola spitting on their customers face, because they bought Pepsi.

Only the film and gaming industry are constantly insulting their consumer base.
It doesn't go a month without a dev coming out and name calling gamers.
 
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True, it is perverse how so many game companies these days are being ran (or at least have social media teams) that hate much of the player base; I just wanted to point out an amusing historical anecdote on why pissing off your customer base like that is a bad idea.
 
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Go woke, go broke! Yes, Ubisoft, keep telling gamers they are scum, hateful ignorants. But you know what the problem is with your high horse approach, besides the obvious? People will play any gay, woman, black characters if the game is good. I mean, for God’s sake, look at Baldurs Gate 3. But you keep producing garbage with an agenda and then you complain the gamers are the problem. I mean, look at the next Assassin Creed, it is already dead. A black guy killing asians with rap music in the background? That really connects people… with San Francisco, as one viral remark went in the comments of the trailer. Bragging about authenticity, when you have Chinese symbols and overhyping a historical black guy, whose story is 90% a fabrication of a western novel is ridiculous. But wait, there’s more, both he and the female character are LGBTQ? That is just, wow! Good luck with bankruptcy!
Edit: Ok, you might be sayin, hypocrite, you just said “if the game is good, people will play it”. Well, in order to be good it has to draw you in, building a realistic world of that time, it’s not just the mechanics, which at this time, they’re more of the same for any AC. I bet, 90% of gamers would like to play in feudal Japan with Japanese characters and I bet they would not care of their sexual preferences (which btw, were pretty shady back then, anyway), if that was not pushed into their faces at every turn.
 
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So after being called by thewoke: incel, loser, troll, neckbeard, racist, vile, bigot and all sorts of -phobe, these nice people from Ubisoft want me to pay for their games in which they either destroy the Star Wars universe with an ugly as sin Her Solo "powerful female figure" or via a black hip hop samurai in medieval setting Japan? Bwahahaha.
Sure. Remove the female shinobi Naoe and the black Yasuke and replace them with two Japanese males and I'm paying for the game.
Or not, it's your call and my money, in the end I can pay for non woke games like black myth wukong while you insult me further. I'm happy as a clam playing Space Marine 2. I really don't care if Ubisoft, that threatens clients with reporting to the police for swearing in a game, or tells me I need to get comfortable not owning my games, goes bankrupt and fires thousands of DEI activists.
Let's see who laughs last, the 60-70% male audience which you keep belittling and insulting or several thousand woke people.
Keep creating games for modern audiences, I identify as non paying and until you create games for the 'toxic males', you can't have my money.
#getwokegobroke
 
Anyone using "woke" in the pejorative is an immediate disregard of their commentary.
 
People will comment " nobody would care about DEI if the game was good" and I think they miss the point. One of the key components of the DEI/BRIDGE cult is that this message must be everywhere, you must evangelize it at all times, and it must be a core part of your business.

So you hire people who believe in the DEI, and those people can only make the DEI. Baulders gate 3 has plenty of LGHDTV rep, but it also has plenty of straight rep, and the creators don't spend time on twitter fuming at normal people existing. See the difference between them and Ubisoft? The difference is BG3 selling well over 20 million copies. How well did Skull and bones sell? Outlaws?

When you make identity politics your core identity, everything else crumbles. No studio that screams about skin color or sexual orientation can make good products, it's just a fact ( also why GoY is likely gonna suck hard compared to GoT). Ubi is doomed to mid mediocrity at best, and that cannot sustain them. They have captured the full " modern audience" and it cannot sustain them

I look forward to Ubisoft going under, and taking their terrible studios with them. It's all tainted now, burn it down just to be sure.
 
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